Soviet Signs and Street Relics

This book presents Russia’s forgotten world of avant‑garde public signage. French photographer Jason Guilbeau has used Google Street View to virtually navigate Russia and the former USSR, searching for examples of a forgotten Soviet empire. From remote rural roadsides to densely populated cities, the photographs reveal traces of history in plain sight: a brutalist hammer and sickle stands in a remote field; a jet fighter is anchored to the ground by its concrete exhaust plume. This collection of photographs portrays a surreal reality: it is a document of a vanishing era, captured by an omniscient technology that is continually deleting and replenishing itself―an inadvertent definition of Russia today.