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.

The Architect

Igor Nikiliovich, the man who befriended us on the train and took me in, slipped into a somber drunk that, after a few days, rendered him with no more capacity than a young child. At first he took care of us, but in the end we took care of him.

Before Igor Nikiliovich launched himself into an epic “zapoi” he put us in contact with Mamanov, a man of some importance in the local mining interests. Mamanov in turn put us in contact with another man of even greater importance in the local mining industry, who then put us in contact with Troshin, the architect.

Vitaliy Alexseivich Troshin is a man of small stature, long arms, and a composer’s head of hair. Having trained at the prestigious St. Petersburg Institute of Circus Pedagogy, he entered a profession which suited his joie de vivre and natural sense for the dramatic, clowning.

However, a deeper purpose called to his attention a love for creation, and he quit the circus to become an architect. Through a long and circuitous route of endless Soviet and Post-Soviet bureaucracy, he finally became the City Architect of Vorkuta.

Troshin’s major contribution to the city of Vorkuta is a number of monuments memorializing the city’s history as a former site of a major Gulag prison.

Having been trained in the Soviet school of brutalist architecture, Troshin is an adept at social realism. In other words, highly stylized works of public propaganda.

Additionally, Troshin is a member of Memorial, a type of NGO which preserves and archives Gulag materials. I could not have met a better person to help start my own journey into the Gulag country.

By studying Troshin’s paintings, scale models, and hand-made maps, I began to understand Vorkuta presently, and as a former penal colony. 

Not only in a an abstract sense, but geographically, physically, viscerally. I had no idea until those first meeting with Troshin what I was dealing with. With no point of reference, and only a few details, the gulag country was a dim conception in my mind.

However, Troshin shed a light of creativity upon this dim country, and for the first time in my life, I saw its face. And indeed, the Gulag did have a face.  

Map painting by V. Troshin

The Vorkuta Gulag was not a single prison, but an extensive network of labor camps which serviced dozens of coalmines. Since the 1930’s Vorkuta coal fueled heavy industry in the USSR, and now The Russian Federation and factories across Europe and China.

Troshin noted that the placement of the coal mines, the roads, and the prisons, formed a face in side-profile. For the gulag, which was hidden and intentionally kept anonymous for so many years, to develop a face in this way, a de facto identity in this manner, was intriguing and moving. Was it possible that the gulag workers, even my own great-grandfather, a builder himself, had intentionally build the Vorkuta Gulag in this manner?

I will never know. However, as I studied this face, it called to me. It wanted me to walk its contours, circumnavigate its cranium, summit its nose, and wade through its boggy eyes. 

Blood Hospitality

"The Kolyma was the greatest and most famous island, the pole of ferocity of that amazing country of Gulag which, though scattered in an Archipelago geographically, was, in a psychological sense, fused into a continent--an almost invisible, almost imperceptible country."

"Decades go by, and the scars and sores of the past are healing over for good. In the course of this period some of the islands of the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants."

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago  

Igor N.

Igor Nikoliovich adopted me on the train, and by the end of an uncomfortable and greasy two days of talking about life he invited Danil and I to stay at his apartment. This I felt was a promising start.

Danil is a friend I met while living in Yekaterinburg years ago. He’s an extraordinarily competent operator. And I mean that in the most complementary way possible: because if you are not some type of operator in Russia, you’re pretty much nothing. Danil does a good job translating, too. Without him, things would be impossible. The locals would probably think I escaped from a mental institution if I tried to explain why I was here with my Russian. As it is people seem to have this itch like conniption when they realize that I have come here by my own free will.

We stayed at the stuffy and hot Hotel Vorkuta for only one night. This was fine by me. The tub/showers were arranged in such a peculiar and cramped way that I felt several times I was going to snap my ACL due to the strange squat contortions I had to assume in order to clean my body.

We made our way to Igor’s apartment. He invited us in and showed us the room he had prepared. His wife was out of town and the only other occupants of the apartment were Max, a black poodle, and Solomon, a chinchilla that had escaped and was lurking about crapping in some nether region of the apartment.

Russians can be incredibly generous, and if you are taken in, it’s like an instant blood bond. Which can be a good thing, but also a really bad thing at the same time. It’s expected that you will honor this blood bond, and that usually means that you are expected to drink tremendous quantities of vodka, beer, and brandy all together in a cacophony of alcoholism. This is a problem for anyone who does not share the aptitude for drink the way Russians do, but especially bad if you don’t drink at all, like me. I can’t even take a single shot and get slapped on the back for being a wimp to at least show some type of appreciation for this blood hospitality. 

If the drink is refused, then a gangrene-like rot of resentment can set in.

I had my apprehensions about giving up the neutral ground and independence of the hotel, however, I have learned that being a documentarian type in a new place is like being trapped in a dark box, and that no hand should ever be refused when it comes to help you take your first steps out of that box.

I considered the possibility that staying at Igor’s might not be such a good idea. However, he only drank a small bottle of beer during the entire train ride, which I found impressive. He seemed to have a fairly forgiving attitude when we explained that we didn’t drink.

When Igor handed me the key he was already drunk.

And I knew that as soon as I took that key. The blood bond would be made.

Soon after Danil and I arrived, Igor’s friend, also named Igor stopped by with four of five large cans of beer. Danil and I made dinner for ourselves and the Igors.

Igor #2 was a pretty nice guy. He looked like a Ryan Gosling if Ryan Gosling had worked in a coal mine for twenty years, if you can imagine that. He was one of those Russians who idolized America, too. I had met many of these types during my two years of living in Russia previously. I’m always nice to them when they ask me the same basic question, “is America better than Russia?” I never say yes. I explain that Russia and America are very similar. Both have problems.

Igor 2 was pretty disappointed with me. I think he was expecting John Wayne, but me, a slightly hipsterish east coaster who dresses too well; well, I think I fulfilled the role of a mid-level anti-hero at best.

After getting into heated arguments about Visas and American freedom with the Igors, Danil and I retired to our room. The Igors set out to take a walk (gulyat), AKA drink some more beer. They returned with brandy, and then a sort of riot ensued.

Igor #1, who we met on the train, is like a large barrel on bowl legged struts with a bad lower back. This causes him to lean on things, and with his head of black and silver hair he has a decidedly gorillaish disposition.  He graduated from the Institute of Physical Culture in Saint Petersburg and played hockey as a younger man. He’s missing a number of front teeth, which I think makes it easier for him to yell.

I couldn’t find the key Igor#1 gave me. I knew it was in the apartment, someplace. Igor #1 was outraged. I might as well have lost the Holy Grail and Henry Jones had turned into an angry drunk gorilla.

Igor #2 had to partition us. I was in one room, and then Danil was in the other room, pretending to look for the key and trying to calm Igor #1 down. It took about an hour for things to slightly calm down, and we finally agreed that I would replace the entire lock first thing the following day. However, the offense had been made.

Igor #1 turned out to be a serious alcoholic dismissed from the mines for drinking on the job. And Igor #2 also works doggedly in the mines. He owns two small kiosk stores, but he’s constantly broke because he has to pay the mafia off to run his businesses. He dreams of escaping to America with his family, where he imagines everything will be better.

Just before I went to bed that night, thoroughly exhausted and totally in doubt as to why I came to Vorkuta, I found the key. Somehow it had slipped underneath my blanket.

I’m trying to come up with a smart way to smoothly connect the Solzhenitsyn quote with what’s happened to me so far, and I can’t at the moment, so I’ll just write it strait. I realize now that Solzhnistyan is rather adroitly referring to the fact that the Gulag existed in two places. Physically it was a clandestine network of labor camps serviced by an anonymous and complex transit systems. But, the gulag found its completion and full strength in the hearts and minds of the people. In other words, it’s a state of being. And, I think that the Gulag still exists here to some degree.

As soon as I was handed that key to Igor #1’s apartment, I was given the key to my own cell in the Gulag. I haven’t entered a real prison. I can leave when I want. Everything is okay. But I did enter into a state of being. I was initiated into the way things are here.

The Gulag Calls

My great-grandfather with my great-grandmother, camera right, some time in the 1940's.

There he is, the Old Tulek, my great-grandfather. Poised elegantly between good and bad, right and wrong. He was indeed a player. A gangster. A statesman. An engineer. A smuggler. A lover. Ready to take advantage of anyone who would dare to trust him, and vanquish anyone who would tempt to beat him.

He's not someone you'd want to do business with, nor someone you'd introduce your wife to. If he knew your secret, he'd own you. But, he is the exact type of person you'd want right next to you if you were being pushed into a heated cattle car on a train bound for the Siberian Gulag. You might not have faith in your own ability to survive, but you would have complete confidence that if one person could make it, it would be Tulek.

Why he was sent to the Gulag, no one knows. Rumors run wild. It's said he had a stash of diamonds in a bag the size of a man's fist which tempted a local KGB chief to bust him on false charges and take the diamonds. Some say it was his political involvement a Western Ukrainian splinter Republic that had been ousted by an invading Hungarian army. But the most likely story is that he messed around with one too many women, and for the sake of revenge, was ratted out as some kind of political dissident to the KGB. That's all it took in those days to try and kill a man's soul.

My interest goes far beyond anthologizing, romanticizing, or factualizing my great-grandfather and his time in the Gulag. I have always wanted to go there myself. See it. Smell it. Call it my home for awhile, too. That's why I'm in Vorkuta now, to write my own story.

Vorkuta is one hundred miles north of the arctic circle situated on flat tundra plains. It began as a prison town, using slave labor to extract coal during the Stalinist era. Vorkuta is no longer a prison, but still a coal town.

As a photographer and visual story-teller, I find myself in a strategically important position as next in line, to receive, interpret, and output family tales, like my great grandfather in the Gulag. However, my position is complicated by the fact that I realize some of the stories are inaccurate. This leaves me wondering why memory and perceptions change over time? And, how will I compensate for inaccuracy, and construct a personal narrative that accurately connects me to the past, while placing me firmly in the present. 

From Moscow I took a forty-eight hour train ride to Vorkuta.

 

I feel drawn to my great grandfather's story because he was presented to me as the patriarch of my family. His stories of difficulty, travail, and tragedy resonate within the lives of much of my family. In a sense, all of our stories are an extended version of his.

As traumatic events fall further back into time and lose their context, I believe that it becomes necessary to compensate for this factor by seriously dramatizing, re-working, and re-thinking the manner of representing these events. This ensures that the past will still resonate with the power by which it was initially felt. 

Fall for Fall

"Photographs are ubiquitous: in albums, magazines, books, shop windows, on bill-boards, carrier bags, cans. What does this signify? Thus far, reflection has suggested the thesis that these images signify concepts in a program and that they program society to act as though under a secondary magical spell. However, for people who look at photographs naively they signify something different, i.e. states of things that have been reflected onto surfaces. For these people, photographs represent the world itself. Admittedly, such naive observers will concede that the states of things are reflected onto surfaces from specific points of view but they won't worry too much about that. Any philosophy of photography will therefore seem to them a complete waste of mental energy."

                                                                     -Vilem Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography


I have spent a long time looking at photographs. And I have gone through different stages of looking. 

What first attracted me to photography was the technical aspect of development and printing. This became my philosophy and my way of appraising work. I was not so much concerned by content as much by understanding the invisible technique of the master printer.

At a certain point, I became interested in, and invested in, the the use of photography to document time and history. By this I mean reportage, news, and documentary photography. Here, I think I felt most disappointed.

I was more disappointed by the photographers. I expected great photographs to come from great people. However, I often found that great documentary photographs came from horrible people. And I mean horrible. It's hard to believe in a photograph when one does not believe in the person taking it.

Graduate school has seen me transition into yet another stage of photo-philosophy. Academic. This simply means that I think more about photos than I take or make them. Which is not a bad thing. Photographs are interesting objects. It's amazing that those shinny, flat, rectangular things on your wall support entire academic departments in nearly every university and museum in the world, take up whole scholarly careers, and fill the subject matter of countless books.

You can go to any K-mart and make your own photograph in minutes. You cannot go to K-mart and make your own statue, your own piece of music, or your own painting. Photos are interesting things to think about. 

The nice thing I have to report is that it has become simple for me. I like a photograph that asks a question, or leaves me asking a question about myself.

Most photography does not do this, as Flusser suggests. Much of photography projects a sort of fantasy onto life that we enjoy like chocolate.

The next time you have occasion to look at a photograph, even waiting in line at the grocery store, ask it if it has a question for you. If you do this earnestly, you will be surprised to find that most photographs do not ask questions but more often tell you how to think.

"A photograph is not the possession of a moment, it is the moment between before and after. It's fragile from interpretation and certainty."
                                                                      -Owen Butler

 







 

Blank Knabl Alkbn

Sometimes a crystalline koan-like moment in life shatters to reveal what lays beyond the limits of everyday understanding. Such a moment occurred to me this past May. It started with an installation.

 Installation refers to, in the most basic sense, the process by which art is installed into a gallery space. Prior to the 1960's, installation meant white walls, frames, and spot lighting. The standard museum set-up.

However, the term installation has taken on new and varied meanings in today's art world. It posses nuances, many of which, can only be determined by the context in which the term is used.

Here is a simple guide of these nuances:

1) If you are in Brooklyn, and some hipster talks about their installation, they are most likely referring to the closet of a gallery they just payed five grand to show their work in the East Village.

2) If you hear a professor use the word "installation" in a lecture you can be assured said professor is referring to some post-modernist acid induced exhibit from '73.

3) If you hear an MFA student talk about their installation, they are referring to the last minute, last ditch, 3am feverish, rabid decision, right before a big departmental critique, tear everything off the wall and start all over again installation.

All joking aside, the definition of the word installation has evolved over time -- most sharply during the 1960's -- a time many critics claim to be the end of Modernism. Modernism was very much about definitions and a sort of nomenclatured code of organizing and thinking about art. The gallery space in modernist terms was thought of to contain, limit, control, and define a certain subset of artistic categories.

291 Gallery, New York,

The shift in understanding occurred when people began to think over and beyond such specificity in the arts. Conceptually artists and theorists began to think of art and the craft of art as two different things. This generated an attitude of wild experimentation and appropriation. What resulted was that installation and gallery space became a part of the art itself. 

In practical terms though, it simply meant that as art and artist defined space lost its defining borders, then, ideas, approaches, and techniques, became  more cohesive, more whole, more perfect, and ultimately, more universal. It's interesting to compare the gallery space of the early 20th century represented here in the 291 Gallery to Olafur Eliasson's  Weather Project installed in the Tate Modern in 2007. Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery set the standard for cutting edge art in the early 1900's. On the one hand, the 291 Gallery is clearly set on focusing, defining, and separating the art on the wall. In the weather project, the exhibition space is the art.

The Weather Project, Tate Modern, 2007

In terms of my own work, I can only state here, that whatever explanation I give, or photos I'm able to publish in this blog, due absolutely no justice to the work I did in May. However, I will do my best to explain what I did without going of into ridiculous reveries or pointless conceptual abstractions.

This is it, the big secret: I like to take "street" photos, off the hip, in the moment, fun photographs. However, I also like to play around with the 8x10.  It's difficult to explain to faculty that I simply can't choose one or the other. So, I did both. In order to use the two sets of images that I started to generate, I came up with a concept that would allow me to use them in one installation. Here are several photos of depicting the installation.

Walking into the installation, the first thing, is, darkness. The senses are narrowed.

The second element of the installation were the lightboxes. I used the actual 8x10 chromes and back-lit them. Beautiful to behold. There is nothing in digital that comes close. After the 8x10's, you might notice the spyglass.

The spyglass allows you to see what the character is seeing.

Below are the images that the character, that the viewer can also see with the spyglass. These images sort of float in the the middle of the room.

After looking at these images, one notices that they seem to move, almost shiver. You move closer, and realize there is more to see. Behind the images, there is a video being projected. I used the light of the projector to back-light the still images. This effect gave them the quality of moving, but staying still at the same time. Shivering. This is a view from the other side of the room.

Below is a selection of 8x10's and the smaller 35mm stills. I choose wetlands as my primary shooting location because it captured the essence of the place that I imagined to be inside myself where my most private thoughts reside -- it is a place beyond even dreams. Dreams provide us an escape. But there is no escape from this place.

The new character, who does not have a name, is living in a swamp. He explores the swamp and travels it. He has a suitcase with him which contains one important tool . . . a spyglass. The spyglass is a metaphor which represents the act of seeing. The spyglass is an illusory tool; extremely useful, but ultimately misleading in it's most literal sense: the object which appears close is actually not.

He is a type of collector. He collects what he sees. But what he sees is not what he gets. He may be looking at a living deer through his spy glass, but what he finds in his world, is something else entirely.

Think of this video as a moving still. Turn off the lights, use headphones, and just be with it.

  My installation incorporated not just the two sets of photographs I had taken (35mm and 8x10), but light, darkness, water, video, view photography, and street photography. I do not consider the installation multimedia in nature, but I conceive of it as a singularity. My conceptual and practical effort became to weave these desperate elements together to form a mass that in turn hid the differences, exclusivities, and conflicts inherent between street photography and the constructed image.