Better known as one of the major Soviet poets of the postwar period, Yevgeny Yevtushenko was also an obsessive photographer. 

Invisible Threads brings those two practices together: a large-format collection of photographs made across the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and his travels elsewhere, accompanied by poems, prose and fragments of autobiography.

 Yevtushenko photographs faces, crowds, dancers, workers, older women, children, rituals and street life with the same appetite for human particularity that runs through his poetry. Some are comic, some theatrical, some remarkably tender; together they build an argument about the barely visible connections between strangers, cultures and individual lives. The book contains around 175 photographs in colour and black and white, interspersed with Yevtushenko’s writing. Contemporary reviews noted that the book revealed a substantial photographic practice that had been largely eclipsed by his literary reputation.

This is also a particularly nice object in its own right: very much an early-1980s hybrid of photography book, poetry collection and personal document, rather than simply a monograph of photographs.

Edition & condition: Macmillan Company of Australia, 1981. First Australian edition, hardcover with dust jacket; simultaneously published in London by Martin Secker & Warburg. Translated by Paul Falla and Natasha Ward. Light shelf wear to jacket; internally clean and well preserved. Very good condition.