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Brothers Under the Skin

A man stands in a darkened room, shirtless, his body all muscles and ink. His left shoulder is adorned with an arc of onion domes and an icon. On his lower torso is a Russian Orthodox priest. His tattoos mark him as a former zek, or prisoner, and an "honest thief."

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In the "Zek" series, Weber depicts Russian and Ukrainian former prisoners in domestic settings. His pictures of the zeks are starkly lit and often show the men appearing to emerge out of the darkness. In the backgrounds are recurring household objects: soft toys, carpets hung on walls, icons and landscape prints.

"Sometimes they're living with their families, or maybe a guy got out of prison and he's living with his brother and his wife, or with nephews or nieces," Weber said. "You'll go into a three-room apartment, and three of those rooms plus the kitchen are full of different families, or a bunch of single guys, or a couple of ex-zeks and a couple of prostitutes."

Private Hell

Born to Russian anti-tsarist exiles in Brussels, Serge grew up in poverty and from his teenage years became involved in anarcho-socialist circles. By the time he reached revolutionary Russia in 1919, he had already served several years in French jails. His ardor undimmed, he joined the Bolsheviks and began working for the Comintern, with postings abroad in Vienna and Berlin. He soon began to have doubts about the Party's authoritarian tendencies, and in 1925 he recklessly returned to Russia to join Trotsky's fight against Stalin. Expelled from the Party and eventually deported to the Urals, he was allowed to leave the country only after international protests (he was lucky to escape alive). Serge wrote against the Stalinist regime from exile, but his warnings fell on deaf ears. In 1941, he joined the throng of Parisians who fled the occupied city on foot (an exodus vividly described by his French-Russian compatriot Irene Nemirovsky in her beautiful, and in many ways comparable, "Suite Francaise"), boarded the last refugee ship out of Vichy France, and eventually fetched up in Mexico City. It was here that he wrote his classic autobiography, "Memoirs of a Revolutionary," and his last two novels, "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" and "Unforgiving Years."