In St. Petersburg, the Trendy Griboyedov Club, a brightly painted subterranean night spot, occupies the site of a Cold War-era bomb shelter. Elsewhere, thousands of similar shelters sit empty and decaying or have been converted to mundane uses such as data storage, now that nuclear fear has been supplanted by more amorphous threats. Ross's photographs of shelters around the world are colorful and melancholy, suffused with a creepy Egglestonian light. "Shelters are the architecture of failure," he says. "The failure of moderation, politics, communication, diplomacy, and sustaining humanity." Most amazing is the scale of such hidden places as Beijing's Underground City, built to hold three hundred and fifty thousand people, or the bunker beneath the Greenbrier hotel, in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, designed to serve as the emergency shelter for the entire U.S. Congress.
Copyright © 2005
The New Yorker
"[a] jolly little volume. . . from the glory days of nuclear paranoia." -- World of Interiors, December 2004
...a survey of postapocalyptic havens...serenly beautiful, if chilling. They combine stripped-down survivalist aesthetics...with a troglydytic domesticity -- Wired, July 2004
...colorful and melancholy, suffused with a creepy Egglestonion light -- The New Yorker, July 5, 2004
Richard Ross turns his lens on such underground hideaways and finds an eerie sort of loveliness. -- Time Out New York, June 17, 2004
About the Author
Richard Ross has been teaching at UCSB since 1977. He has photographed for the NY Times Magazine , Los Angeles Times Magazine , Discover , Vogue , San Francisco Examiner , and Frankfurter Allgemeine , among others. He is the principal photographer for the
