Photographer Heidi Hollinger's just-published fifth book The Russians Emerge (Abbeville Press, 2002) is an elegantly presented chronicle of her ten years in that country. The former photo editor at Pravda, Hollinger got to know her politicians, from Vladimir Putin and Mikhail Gorbachev (who wrote the foreword) to the radical demagogue Vladimir “Mad Vlad” Zhirinovsky (who advocated taking Alaska back from the United States and unleashing a wave of radioactivity on Latvia if it refused to rejoin the motherland). More remarkable, however, are the “working folk” images: street cleaners, a plumber, a baker, a house painter—citizens of the old Russia caught up in the new. Some subjects relish their new-found freedoms; for others, freedom is a cold word. Says Hollinger, “I want to capture … that moment when character and context come together in a cohesive whole.”

–Robert Kilborn