The Long Walk

I started photographing in Vorkuta by trolling the streets. Photographing details and other elements of the city that I felt a visual affinity towards. As I became braver, I started photographing people, walking, playing, sitting, etc.

However, even after days like this, there was no picture. No theme or subject, nor rhyme or music.  

A significant obstacle stood before me like a cliff wall during those initial days: the Gulag no longer existed.

The place I had come to see and experience, the place I only knew through fiction, documentary, history, and most importantly, my great-grandfather’s stories, no longer existed. The shacks, barbwire fences, and guard towers which typified most gulag camps, had been destroyed many decades ago in an attempt to bury the past.

However, although the USSR had succeeded in destroying the Gulag in a temporal and physical sense, the memory of those fences and towers was still alive.

The photographs started with memory.

The memory of the Gulag is very much alive. In Vorkuta, there are people, like Troshin, who keep the memory going. I met a lady who created her own Gulag museum in a borrowed room from the school she taught in. I met another unassuming man who had spent his life working as a minor clerk, and now keeps track of old gulag documents. It was through them, that I was able to photograph. Troshin though, provided the most assistance. His maps and map painting did what maps do, told me where to go.

Old Soviet Map of the Vorkuta Gulag

I saw this map and I knew immediately what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, which was to visit all the prison sites of the Vorkuta Gulag, and simply photograph.

It took some explaining, but Troshin understood. And, before I knew it, an affable man with silver hair and bright blue eyes strolled into Troshin's studio.

His name was Victor, and he had lived in Vorkuta all his life. Troshin had arranged for Victor to be my guide and driver to the sites. Victor knew the city and the surrounding area like a kid knows the monkey bars.

Victor was the type of person who kept nothing inside himself, and  therefore was capable of speaking continuously for hours at a time. His stories, experiences, and anecdotes wove a blanket of memory and nostalgia over a landscape that was barren and wild to my eyes.

He was a guide to an unseen world, and like a Charon, led me to a land of death: the archipelago. As I groped with my camera and imagination to understand my own presence in this place where memory, history, story, and vacant present met, the ground of these sites seemed to rumble with silence. What secrets this land held.