Chief Designer S. Korolev’s home study, Korolev Apartment Museum, Moscow

Description:

For his series Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age, Adam Bartos traveled to Moscow to capture the aura of an era. He structured the project around the legacy of the mysterious "Chief Designer" Sergei Korolov, the mastermind of the Soviet space program, responsible for launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. Korolov's existence was considered a state secret until his real identity was acknowledged many years after his death in 1966.

This photograph was taken in Korolov's former home in Moscow, now a museum. Bartos tried to avoid the obvious kitsch present in many images commemorating the Space Age, and instead looked for a unique and honest way to present it. Bartos says of the locations photographed for the series that "sometimes it might be difficult to tell whether what you are seeing is abandoned, in active use, or part of a museumbut that's really how it is."