Soviet Transport

Soviet Transport – Abandoned Vehicles and Transit Infrastructure Across Post-Soviet Regions

Soviet Transport is a color photobook by Hoshino Ai, published by Tokyo Kirara. The book documents vehicles and transit infrastructure left in place after the dissolution of a vast socialist state, working across Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.

The photographs are organized as a typology of industrial archaeology. Cable cars, rail lines, aircraft, ships, tanks, trucks, and amusement-park rides are each treated as discrete objects — recorded for their material condition and site context rather than for symbolic weight. The sequence is descriptive and systematic. Each vehicle or structure is presented as a final station: neither mourned nor celebrated, simply documented.

The geographic scope connects regions that share a common infrastructural inheritance while diverging sharply in the decades since. Hoshino Ai moves through Eastern Europe and Central Asia without imposing a unified narrative. The work accumulates through repetition and variation — the same categories of object, different states of arrest.

Compact at 21 × 15 cm and 120 pages, Soviet Transport functions equally as documentary fieldwork and as a visual index. It belongs to a body of work in Photobooks concerned with post-Soviet landscape and Soviet-era material culture. Readers engaged with infrastructure studies, typological photography, or the visual history of the post-Soviet space will find the approach direct and the scope precise. The companion volume Soviet Architectural Design - Hoshino Ai applies a related methodology to the built environment of the same regions.