The older generation in Russia grew up with the horrifying stories of the Gulag. Almost every family in Russia lost somebody during Stalin Purge or knew someone effected by them.
The idea to do a story about the Gulag came to me when I was in Karelia and visited Solovki in 2018. Independent guides agency masterly balanced the barbarity of the Gulag with an incredible beauty of the islands. All remains of the past were restored there, but it didn’t weaken the history of the place....
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The older generation in Russia grew up with the horrifying stories of the Gulag. Almost every family in Russia lost somebody during Stalin Purge or knew someone effected by them.
The idea to do a story about the Gulag came to me when I was in Karelia and visited Solovki in 2018. Independent guides agency masterly balanced the barbarity of the Gulag with an incredible beauty of the islands. All remains of the past were restored there, but it didn’t weaken the history of the place. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called Solovki the "mother of GULAG" (Main Administration of Corrective Labor Camp). The Solovki "special" camp served as a testing ground where security measures were developed and tested. Other forms of repression, sterile described as innovations in "living conditions" and work production norms were also implemented.
In 1989, the first permanent exhibition,” The Solovki special camp”, was open on the islands. At the time, this was the first anywhere in the USSR to be devoted to the Gulag.
In 2019, I was invited by Zarya Art Residency in Vladivostok to continue my work from Karelia. Because most of the Gulag camps were located in Siberia and the Far east, my travel took me to remote areas of Khabarovsk, Berobidzhan, Komsomolsk-na-Amure, Magadan, and their surroundings. I was surprised to learn that majority of the people I met don’t want to remember this past, don’t want to talk about it, and are trying to forget this part of their country’s history. I was shocked to speak to young people, who were never heard or taught of Stalin’s crimes against his own people, and thus could not understand the basis for my project.
I strongly believe that it’s my obligation to complete this work, to keep the memory of people who lost their lives alive, to remember the past so, hopefully, it will never happen again.
My approach to this work was to connect the past to the present. I interviewed and photographed people who were themselves victims or children of casualties of the Stalin purge. I attempted to tell their stories.
Majority of photographs in the project are composites. Composite photography is simply the blending of two or more images to create one final image.
I combined my original photographs with historic photographs of that time. Some of the images were created using photographs from the exact same places. Absorb this visualization of history; I hope it will be as powerful for you as it is for me!
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