Four Stories from the Russian Arctic

An exhibition of Arbugaeva’s work, which recently concluded at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, is called “Hyperborea”—an allusion to a tribe in Greek mythology that lived beyond the north wind. Arbugaeva has long been fascinated by speculative maps of this territory, “the way the Arctic was alive in people’s imagination before they even set foot there.” Though she calls herself a documentarian, imagination and even magic play parts in her work. Her photographs, she says, may seem too detached from history, “too sweet” in their auroral spectacle or still-life hush. The unreality is deliberate. Her work is meant to invoke the folktales attached to Arctic landscapes, the sense of a world subtended by spirits that must be thanked or placated. It is also meant to reflect a modern, magic-realist attitude, with which the facts of the Arctic—the harshness of traditional life, the exploitation of natural resources, the depredations of global warming—may be expressed in all their complexity. Arbugaeva’s series “Kanin Nos” is a portrait of a couple, Ivan and Evgenia, who are lighthouse keepers and meteorologists at a remote station on the Kanin Peninsula, between the White and Barents Seas. In one of Arbugaeva’s images, the couple hardly register amid a snowy haze as they approach the lighthouse. (Evgenia avoids going outside alone, for fear of polar bears.) When Arbugaeva travelled to photograph Ivan and Evgenia, they asked her to bring some apples, and she photographed those, too. Wrapped in newspaper, to protect against the cold, they appear as treasures from a world left behind.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3xIUwhn