One photographer traces Moscow’s architectural history through its iconic metro stations
4 November 2019
Text:
Katie Marie Davies
Hidden beneath the streets and their churning traffic, the Moscow metro is one of the city’s beloved landmarks. Stretching both across kilometres of land and decades of turbulent social history, it remains a living, breathing monument that unites millions of Muscovites moving through their daily lives. Capturing it all in a single frame is the job of photographer Aleksey Narodizkiy.
Narodizkiy approaches the metro as a single, sprawling architectural object, rather than a series of individual stations. His work, which has already been snapped up by clients such as the Moscow government and Wallpaper*, is uploaded to his Instagram account, Moscow Metro Architecture.
For Narodizkiy, who specialises in photographing architecture, interiors, and exhibitions, part of the metro’s appeal is its ability to capture and immortalise a certain period of the country’s evolving design history: from the grand “palaces for the people” envisioned by Stalin, to sleek, functional stations with modernist flare. “You can see the whole history of Soviet architecture,” he says.
