There are 150 metro, or subway systems, in the world and the Moscow Metro is almost without doubt the grandest. Beautiful, ornate and grand, decked out with stunning examples of socialist realist art, the Moscow Metro is the world’s largest subway system in terms of passenger rides, carrying eight to nine million passengers on an average weekday. It also boasts 265 km of track, eleven lines and 165 stations, an average distance between stations of 1800 m (resulting in commercial speeds of 42 km/h) and is almost entirely built underground. Transplanted Dutch native Bee Flowers’ Moscow Metro project may have started out for purely selfish purposes, but he is now sharing his 28 panoramas and more than 500 photos of Moscow’s renowned subway stations with the rest of the world. What drove Flowers to capture the subways stations in the city he now calls home? Unable to find a book of photographs, he decided to shoot them himself. “I wanted to have a closer look at these beautiful and historically significant mosaics within the confines of my comfortable home,” he explains on his site. Later, he discovered the charms of virtual reality and set off to shoot one pano for every station – a lofty goal that he has abandoned, for the moment.
The construction of the Moscow Metro was begun in the early 1930s and is world famous for its palatial marble stations with mosaics, chandeliers and precious materials. The first line opened in May 1935 and two more lines were added before WWII. Natural stone materials, including semi-precious stones make each station individual and give them a museum-like atmosphere: Coarse-grained pink marble is used for wall decoration, white marble was brought from the Ural Mountains, Middle Asia and the Caucasus, black marble comes from the Urals, Armenia and George and decorates Byelorusskaya, Ploshchad Revolutsii, Elektrozavodskaya and Aeroport, deep red marble in the Krasnye Vorota station is from Georgia. Semi-precious stones such as pink rodonite and marble onyx are used in panels and plates at Dinamo, Byelorusskaya and Kievskaya.
The Moscow Metro has ten radial lines, and one 20 km circular line that connects all the other lines. The Metro uses a unique method for denoting the travel direction: On the ring line male voices are used for clockwise travel and female voices for counter-clockwise travel; the incoming (towards Moscow’s center) radial lines use male announcers while the outgoing use female.
The Mayakovskaya station is generally regarded as the architectural masterpiece with 33 mosaic cartoons by the famous Russian artist Alexander Deineka. (Unfortunately, Bee’s Mayakovskaya panorama could not be converted into a VR but you can view it on his website.) Another popular station with tourists is the Dushkin-designed Ploschad Revolutsii Station, populated with bronze figures of the creators of the new socialist order as well as soldiers, workers and collective farm workers, in total 76 statues by sculptor Manizer. The luxurious Komsomolskaya’s ceiling is adorned with mosaic panels depicting the country’s great military leaders, from Nevsky and Donskoy to Suvorov and Prince Kutuzov. The mosaic panels were created using ancient Byzantine techniques and include in them tiny squares of colored glass, marble and even granite. The Novoslobodskaya station, opened in 1952, is perhaps the brightest and most ornate station, featuring stained-glass windows and a stunning mosaic panel.
There’s more to www.beeflowers.com than Metro stations; Flowers has an extensive photography collection that includes dachas, provincial Russia, people and Soviet hotels, to name just a few. Of these photographs, he writes, “I photograph because certain things profoundly bother me. To my frustration, the Western life I had left behind is overtaking my chosen place of residence, and art has become my way of dealing with that”
(Lists are from www.nationmaster.com)
About Bee Flowers:
Bee grew up in Holland, save for several teenage years spent in Egypt, and has lived and worked in Russia throughout the ‘90s. An early affinity for Russian literature and music caused him to take up Russian language at Amsterdam University. There, the exposure to Soviet political history motivated him to personally witness the workings of the totalitarian state from within. First visiting Moscow in 1989, the energized turmoil of Perestroika and the ensuing collapse of the USSR inspired him to stay, and he quickly became active within the emerging business community.
He has always photographed, earlier on mastering techniques for portraiture, urban landscape, and architectural photography. After working in b/w for many years, his attraction to the world of painting has made him switch to working in color. Sources of inspiration during this last period include artists such as Eggleston, Rauschenberg and Warhol. Traveling through those parts of the world in which he has a direct emotional investment, he has created a body of work concerned with societal change, using people's habitat as the central subject of his poetic metaphors.
