Lost America

"Lost America" is a photographic exhibition of the American historian of Russian architecture, photographer, professor of Slavic studies at Tulane University, William Kraft Broomfield, whose interest turns to disappearing urban spaces, trivial, at first glance, buildings, whose mysticism reveals another, mysterious, quiet America.

"Quiet America" is not a documentary project; it is not narrated by photographed objects. The images are rooted in a specific time and place, but their value lies in an alienated vision that finds aesthetics in de-aestheticised spaces - ruined buildings, abandoned storefronts, surfaces with torn and layered posters.

The history of William Broomfield's activities, as well as the fate of the Quiet America project, are tightly intertwined with Russia. William Kraft Broomfield was born in 1944 in the South of the United States in Charlotte, North Carolina. In 1966, Broomfield graduated with a BA in Russian from Tulane University in New Orleans, followed by an MA in Slavic Languages from the University of California, where he taught Russian language and literature, and then received his doctorate in 1973. In the summer of 1970, Broomfield's first trip to the USSR took place as part of a teaching exchange with Moscow University. The 120 film transparencies he brought back from this trip were his first photographic experience.