The multi-award-winning international photographer knew he had dozens of rolls of black-and-white film he had shot in and around Moscow in the mid-1990s, but never had the chance to develop them. Multiple rental locations and less-than-ideal archival storage meant Sewell knew, even if he could find the lost material among the hundreds of storage boxes, the film would most likely be destroyed after all these years. A Russian Orthodox church complex south of Moscow, the site of an Orthodox wedding filmed by Sewell. Photo: Dean Sewell “Dean’s Russia rolls had become something of a household name over the years,” said friend and fellow photographer, Canadian David Maurice Smith. “He would occasionally refer to them, but I think there was this fear that even if he did figure out where they were, the film would probably be cooked.” There was also the matter of cost. As a freelance photographer, there was no client to cover the cost of manually developing the film. As Russian airstrikes began in Kyiv and Donetsk in late February, Sewell located the boxes containing 25 rolls of film that had remained untouched for 26 years. On the day international media reported that refugees fleeing Ukraine reached one million, Sewell began developing the film in the kitchen of fellow photographer Sean Davey. Incredibly, the film rolls showed virtually no signs of wear. “I was seeing pictures that I couldn’t even remember taking…it was like going into the deep recesses of your brain,” says Sewell. “It was an amazing experience, taking me back to my life a quarter of a century earlier.” Dean Sewell and Sean Davey are developing the Russian hardware. Sewell, a two-time winner of World Press Photo Awards for his work on the aftermath of the Aceh tsunami, the Australian bushfires and East Timor – and co-founder of Australian photographer collective Oculi – recalls his first impressions on arrival in Russia. in 1996, as “like walking through a Dostoyevsky novel”. It was a country crippled economically, but with a guarded optimism about the promise of a fledgling democracy. The young photographer from Sydney was faced with a bleak Moscow with its many shuttered storefronts, but was invigorated by the camaraderie of colleagues and new friends making their way through an unprecedented era of comparative media freedom. Here are some of the images he resurrected, 26 years after he walked the streets of Russia’s capital and captured the everyday life of Muscovites. Communist Party supporters rally on the streets of Moscow for Gennady Zyuganov ahead of the 1996 Russian elections. Photo: Dean Sewell

Scenes on the streets of Moscow

The fall of the Iron Curtain opened up a huge and previously untapped consumer market. In 1990, McDonald’s opened its first store in Moscow’s Pushkin Square, with nearly 40,000 people reportedly queuing for a quintessential Western mass consumerism. Originally, the distinctive Soviet flag with a yellow hammer and sickle on red stood at the base of McDonald’s golden arches logo. An elderly woman walks past a McDonald’s restaurant in central Moscow. McDonald’s moved to Russia in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Photo: Dean Sewell Multinational tobacco companies moved into the Russian market and billboard images of the Marlboro man were ubiquitous on the streets of Moscow nearly 20 years before Putin famously channeled the uber-macho icon with his bare-chested equestrian pursuits. Among Sewell’s favorite photographs taken in the run-up to the first democratic elections in post-Soviet Russia in 1996, he depicts a large korfuli bearing the image of Lenin held aloft at a packed Communist Party rally, with billboards advertising Marlboro cigarettes and Claudia Schiffer in the background Revlon cosmetics. An election rally in the streets of Moscow juxtaposes an iconic Russian poster of Vladimir Lenin with the Marlboro Man and Claudia Schiffer. Photo: Dean Sewell The pernicious infiltration of Western culture was a key platform issue for the Communist Party, led by Gennady Zyuganov, during the election campaign. Russia’s emerging oligarch class and billionaire investors abroad were spooked enough to fund independent candidate Boris Yeltsin, who, despite widespread and credible allegations of electoral fraud, became the first democratically elected president of the Russian Federation. Russian military personnel on general rounds at a Moscow metro station during a winter snowfall. Photo: Dean Sewell In another street scene, an ice cream cart can be seen on the left of the image: a common fixture on many Moscow street corners. Russians are one of the biggest consumers of ice cream in the world – in winter they eat it in the belief that it raises the body temperature – and in Soviet times, the production of Stakanchik (the benchmark of Russian ice cream) was quality controlled by the state to ensure that only pure and natural ingredients were used. In winter, when temperatures are known to drop below -30 degrees, carts can be fitted with warming cabinets to prevent the product from freezing.

Red Square

Muscovites and tourists alike have been drawn to Moscow’s most famous square for centuries. In this image, the historic buildings of St. Basil’s, the Kremlin, Lenin’s Mausoleum and the GUM department store overshadow the young people indulging in the newly introduced cobbler fashion. One bears the relatively new tricolor flag of the new Russian Federation. Russian youths pave the road during one of the regular weekend state-sponsored street festivals held behind St. Basil’s Cathedral and Red Square. Photo: Dean Sewell Sewell captured the closing of Red Square in preparation for the May 6 Victory Day parade: the annual spectacle showcasing Russia’s military might celebrating Germany’s surrender to the Red Army at the end of World War II.

Moscow Ballet

Russia’s most valuable cultural export was hit hard after the collapse of the communist regime. Soviet-era budgets for state ballet companies were generous, reflecting the art’s status as the first ambassador, reflecting the USSR’s cultural preeminence to the outside world. In the mid-1990s, Russian ballet was in crisis. Dean Sewell went backstage. Photo: Dean Sewell In the mid-1990s, Russian ballet was in crisis. Domestically, companies were plagued by artistic and financial crises. Kirov was embroiled in an international bribery scandal. and there were fears of infiltration by the local mafia and an emerging oligarchy demanding favors and bribes. In 1995, dancers at the Bolshoi Ballet went on strike and a performance was canceled for the first time in the company’s 219-year history. President Yeltsin had to be called in to settle the dispute. Many dancers and choreographers were leaving Russia for more lucrative placements abroad. Sewell had backstage access to the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theaters. Photo: Dean Sewell Sewell did not have access to the Bolshoi, but managed to secure backstage access to the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theaters. The Moscow company, founded during the second world war, was emerging from its own five-year crisis in 1996 when Sewell took these images. An earlier fire had destroyed much of the company’s property and the theater was closed for months. Protest resignations and strike action kept the theater dark for parts of 1991.

Orthodox wedding

Sewell had unlimited access to the wedding of a young couple in the city of Rostov, 200 kilometers south of Moscow. A couple prepares to begin the Russian Orthodox wedding ceremony at the Rostov Kremlin. Photo: Dean Sewell “When I arrived in Moscow in ’96, I felt like I had stepped into a time warp. The cars, the fashions, the way the women wore make-up, everything looked like it was from the 1970s,” he says. Sewell’s documentation of an Orthodox wedding in the Kremlin’s Rostov Church captured what he calls “the confused aesthetic of not knowing exactly what time you are.” The couple’s style of dress, the dimly lit church, the solemnity of the ceremony – which lasted several hours (at one point the bride fainted) – made the photographer feel like he had stepped back in time. “Looking at the photos now, they have a Josef Koudelka aesthetic, like the photos he took in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s – but this is where I was shooting in the 1990s.” Late afternoon light casts a long shadow on one of the thousands of military, political and socialist realism sculptures that adorn the streets of Moscow. Photo: Dean Sewell

Monuments of Moscow

The Russian passion for giant socialist-realist monuments was at its height during the Soviet era, and there are an estimated 6,000 statues of Lenin in the Russian Federation today. When the USSR dissolved in 1991, a condition for the withdrawal of troops from the newly independent nation-states was the continued preservation of the Red Army monuments. But not all of them are universally loved by people. The statue of Peter the Great is 98 meters high. Photo: Dean Sewell In 1996 Sewell captured the construction of one of the most unpopular pieces of public art in the city’s history. At 98 meters tall, the statue of Peter the Great, complete with symbolic armada underfoot, stands as tall as a 30-story building and has been savagely vandalized since its unveiling in 1997. It regularly finds itself in the 10 ugliest monuments lists of the world and continues to irritate critics, who wonder why a city that Peter the Great apparently loathed so much moved his court to St. Petersburg…