I'm a photographer from Moscow, where I live, work, and teach at the Rodchenko School of Photography and Multimedia. 

In the middle of the 1980s, I found myself a witness to the tremendous changes taking pace in the USSR. I listened to underground Soviet rock, and I had two great Soviet cameras: the Zenit-E and the unforgettable point-and-shoot Lomo Compact. 

At the time, we had no idea how the world looked beyond the Iron Curtain. We watched edited films in theaters; we picked up glitchy rock-n-roll on the radio through Voice of America or the BBC. It was impossible to see contemporary photography in the Soviet Union's lone photo magazine, Soviet Photo. But I felt that the time of "change" had come, and I needed to go and shoot.

In 1985, the World Festival of Youth and Students hit Moscow: the concerts, the gatherings, the faces, clothes, and the behavior of the guests were remarkable. In a word, you could call it "freedom". It was simply stunning, for example, to see that guests with long hair weren't taken to the police to have their documents checked and their heads forcibly shaved... 

Back then, I had to photograph without any benchmarks or "teachers"; it was only a year later that a Cartier-Bresson exhibit came to Moscow. I saw a Diane Arbus book for the first time only in 1988, and the same with Koudelka. That year, I took my first trip abroad, to Finland, with a group of photographers, where they were surprised "we" considered them "the West"; we had to explain that the West was everything on that side of the Iron Curtain. 

Over the course of six years, I shot the USSR exclusively for myself. I shot a bit of everything - 1392 rolls of black-and-white film (and that's just the part that survived till today). Around 135 images from that material will be presented in this book, which has been designed together with Yuri Kuznetsov. The first section of the book will be a diary, offering viewers the chance to peek at archive materials. There will be contact sheets and duplicates, illustrating the search for the perfect frame. The second section will be photographs and stories that I picked out on the day of the shoot, immediately after developing the film, as well as images selected years later. 

The funds raised here will be used to cover printing and publication costs, as well as the development of the book's design. 

The book will be published by Treemedia Content Oy (Finland). 

224 pages, offset print, 210x285mm, 

500 copies. 

About the author:
Igor Mukhin has participated in more than 150 personal and group exhibits in Russia and abroad. His earlier books include:
- Avoir 20 ans a Moscou. Texte de G.Saffrais. Editions Alternatives, Paris (1998)
- Born in the USSR. Ekaterina Degot, S. Yetes. Moscow (2005) 
- My Moscow. Zakhar Prilepin. Photographs by Igor Moukhin. Schilt Publishing (2012)
- Igor Moukhin. Photographies 1987 - 2011. Textes: Christian Gattinoni. Éditions Loco, Paris (2012)
- «МОСКВА_2. La Bohème». published by author. Moscow (2015)
- Resistance. Lost in Translation. published by author. Moscow (2015)
- Weekend. published by author. Moscow (2015)
Igor Mukhin's website http://igormukhin.com/