Michel Turek: Siberia

Description

Growing up near Washington DC at the end of the Cold War, Turek has always been drawn to Russia as a taboo, almost verboten place. The project began in the winter of 2016 when he joined author Sophy Roberts as she pursued a three-year search for a historic piano in Siberia. Turek traveled to the region another five times, exploring the vast territory east of the Ural Mountains all the way to the Pacific. His images record a constant tension – sometimes bizarre, often unsettling – between desecrated landscapes alongside pristine wildernesses; between the lives of indigenous people and modern Russians; between worn-out infrastructure and abandoned towns juxtaposed with gleaming new cities pumping gas and oil. The journey takes him deeper and deeper into small towns and villages, into the arsenic green corridors of Khrushchev apartment blocks. The photographs have a slowness and a stillness to them. Each one is a fragment of a conversation, a moment of genuine intimacy between subject and photographer.