NEW YORK, NY.- “Underground: Russian Photography 1970s-1980s” is on view through March 24, 2012 at Nailya Alexander Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 704. Gallery hours are 11am‐6pm, Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment. During the Khrushchev’s cultural thaw, nonconformist art and literary movements, involving such figures and activities as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Josef Brodsky and samizdat, had a great impact on the evolution of Russian photography in the 1970s, and laid the foundation for a new generation of photographers during glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s. Photographers in the exhibition challenged the government‐prescribed optimistic style of socialist realism by photographing forbidden topics, and like other unofficial artists, they risked personal safety in pursuit for individual expression and freedom. In the 1970s, Boris Mikhailov, a pioneer of Russian conceptual