Remember youth centres? Do they still exist? Alternatively known as a community centre. You know, the places you attended a party aged fourteen years old, drank a bottle of Irn Bru flavoured WKD (the large size), shared a cigarette between four people and then were promptly sick over the back seat of your mums car? Point is, youth, and anything with the word youth in front of it (ahem – youth hostels) is a little bit bleak. As is true of Gosha Rubchinskiy’s Youth Hotel, a collection of images of Russian teens, all with that haze of post-Soviet bleakness that we have come to expect from his photographic output. You know – concrete, kids in army uniforms, smoking inside etc.. That kind of thing. But don’t worry, there’s tenderness and hope too within these pages – without getting all “The Greatest Love of All” on you – for Gosha, these children are the future of Russia. “Young people have new ideas, new ways and a new look on normality,” Rubichinsky said of the tome. “For me, this book represents a new generation of hope, the future of Russia now.”
Youth Hotel is published in collaboration with IDEA books and will be available are Dover Street Market London, New York and Tokyo from October 15th.
