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.
About the Photographer
Hoshino Ai is a Japanese photographer whose practice focuses on material culture, infrastructure, and the traces of political history in everyday space. The work proceeds through typological method: restrained, descriptive images that map categories of object across specific environments.
Soviet Transport extends this approach to post-Soviet industrial ruins, applying systematic attention to abandoned transit infrastructure across Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. The companion volume Soviet Architectural Design - Hoshino Ai applies a related methodology to the built environment of the same regions.
