Distilling six years of travel across the former Soviet Union, these images, reminiscent of Tarkovsky and the vision of W. G. Sebald, portray two intertwining dreamtimes: Moscow and the provinces. Hoyer's glimpses of timeless moments of reflection, hope and doubt at the edges of history are not mere mementoes but images in which the daydreams of her subjects seem to leave their mark on the paper. The book is divided into segments of black and white 35mm photographs, the product of quiet voyages to Central Asian cities, Caspian beaches, Arctic outskirts and faded Ukrainian anytowns (awarded with the Leica-Oskar-Barnack-Prize), and medium format color images that crystallize the intensity of Moscow in winter. Page by page the reader is given fragments of a journey that place themselves in the memory as if the reader half-remembers making it. In the exquisite light of Hoyer's pictures, raw from the Siberian sky, dazzling on a Moscow street or attenuated by sea fog, there is an unsettling equality of elements: dogs and men become alike in wistfulness, butterflies and buildings share a common fragility.
