




Konstantin Melnikov, Rusakov Workers’ Club, Mosca, 1927-29. In Denis Esakov, The Fifth Façade, 2017







The increasingly popular technique of drone photography gives us the ability to fly over familiar buildings and to see them from above, exposing to us the fifth facade which is usually concealed from our eyes. Until recently, it was only architects themselves and their clients who had the opportunity to examine models of buildings and see them from all sides. In his Fifth Facade series Esakov does not try to pick out individual parts of a building; what interests him is the building as a whole. Rejecting purely artistic effects, decorativeness, and attempts to transform reality into something else, the photographer spent more than a year painstakingly working on his series in order to create a “volumetric portrait” of each building.
