"The Drunken Bicycle: Travels in the Former Soviet World"

Press Release

“The Drunken Bicycle:  Travels in the Former Soviet World,” a photography exhibit by award winning Ashfield photographer Frank Ward, will be on display at the Neil Hammer Gallery at the Meekins Library in Williamsburg May 1-29, 2025. This exhibit presents new photographs from the recently released book of the same name by Ward and essayist Vivian Leskes. 

There will be an artist reception, reading, and book signing, on SATURDAY, MAY 10 from 2-4pm.

Ward and Leskes have traveled and worked in the republics of the former Soviet Union since 2001.  Photographs in the book depict all fifteen former Soviet republics. According to novelist Roland Merullo, “Vivian Leskes’ prose and Frank Ward’s photos…offer such a perfect sense of the corruption and generosity, the wreckage and celebration, the human spirit alive and well in a sometimes bleak, sometimes festive, always inside out, post communist world.”

Ward and Leskes have traveled and worked in the republics of the former Soviet Union since 2001. Photographs in the book depict all fifteen former Soviet republics. According to novelist Roland Merullo, "Vivian Leskes' prose and Frank Ward's photos. . .offer such a perfect sense of the corruption and generosity, the wreckage and celebration, the human spirit alive and well in a sometimes bleak, sometimes festive, always inside out, post communist world."

Ward, a photographer who lives in Ashfield has pictures in museum collections of Smith College, Amherst College, University of Connecticut and the Danforth Museum. He is a retired Holyoke Community College photography professor, and has taught classes in Egypt, Turkmenistan, and the American Universities program in Aix-en-Provence, France. He has lectured and exhibited in every college of the Five College Consortium. He received the Pioneer Valley Photographic Artists Distinguished Service Award for Contributions to Photography in the Pioneer Valley.

 Essayist, Vivian Leskes is a retired Professor of ESL at Holyoke Community College and an English Language Specialist with the US Department of State. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Irkutsk, Siberia, in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. In addition to her teacher training work in Russia, over the past twenty-two years she has conducted many teacher and mentor trainings in North Africa, the Middle East, the Far East, South America, Central Asia, and Europe. She received the Elaine Marieb Teaching Award for Excellence In Teaching at HCC. *Lost in Siberia*, her memoir of experiences teaching and studying Russian in the Former Soviert Union, was published by Haley’s in 2011. Her essays accompany photographs by Frank Ward in the newly published photo book, *The Drunken Bicycle: Travels in the Former Soviet World.*