By Daniel Stone
Dungeons and castles, princesses and forests. What makes a fairy tale? A wild fiction with lessons hidden in simple characters. Or a far-fetched series of events, in a faraway place. The writer G.K. Chesterton called them stories that show that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition, that good must conquer a physical version of evil— a dragon, a witch, or a big bad wolf.
Modern fairy tales are a little harder to spot. Evil can’t be so easily assigned, nor can good. But if there’s any country so routinely generalized, it’d be Russia. Russia’s aggressive politics, Russia’s ruthless leader, Russia’s boldness in Syria, in Ukraine, and at the Olympics. Russians themselves have never seemed more confident. And Russia’s reputation has hardly ever gotten worse press in the West. A portrait, no matter the angle, in broad brush.
It’s enough that, when you get to see the actual Russia up close, simple scenes of daily life become deeply interesting. That’s the conceit that drove photographer Frank Herfort, a German, to Moscow, where he now lives part-time, and to a series of images of what he calls Russian Fairytales. Herfort’s work on Russian fairy tales might otherwise be dubbed Russia in repose—not of the Russia clenched in political manipulation, but the one where older people spend an afternoon at the pool.
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