Chief Designer S. Korolev's home study, Korolev Apartment Museum, Moscow, 1997

For his series Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age, Adam Bartos traveled to Moscow to capture the aura of an era. He structured the project around the legacy of the mysterious "Chief Designer" Sergei Korolov, the mastermind of the Soviet space program, responsible for launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. Korolov's existence was considered a state secret until his real identity was acknowledged many years after his death in 1966.

This photograph was taken in Korolov's former home in Moscow, now a museum. Bartos tried to avoid the obvious kitsch present in many images commemorating the Space Age, and instead looked for a unique and honest way to present it. Bartos says of the locations photographed for the series that "sometimes it might be difficult to tell whether what you are seeing is abandoned, in active use, or part of a museum—but that's really how it is."

Adam Bartos is known for images with intense, saturated colors depicting ordinary scenes that exude a quiet calm and often a tinge of melancholy. Though he is drawn to places with symbolic significance that have almost come to embody their own clichés—New York City, Los Angeles, Paris—Bartos photographs his subjects from a consistent, disinterested distance that reveals truths beyond the trope. His work examines things and places as they really are and not for what they represent. The resulting photographs speak to the movement of time and things forgotten. Bartos has published several of his photographic series in books. Among them, International Territory: The United Nations, 1945—95, published in 1995, illustrates the effects of time on the United Nations building in New York. In 2001, he published Kosmos: A Portrait of the Russian Space Age, photographs of the "obsolescent future" of the Soviet space program. Yard Sale Photographs, 2009, exemplifies Bartos' attraction to objects with an aura of the relic.

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