Slava Lyu-fa: Inner distance

It is not merely the great distances that separate the inhabitants of the Sakha Republic (Yakutia) from one another. Very few people in the country’s capital city, Yakutsk, are aware of the tough life challenges faced by the people living along the Kolyma River in the far northern reaches. Photographer Slava Lyu-fa wants to change that: in his series, he explores shared experiences and memories within his homeland.

It is an eerie image: a woman stands in a cave in front of a pile of dead fish. For a moment it may feel as though we have landed in a horror scenario – dark, cold and hopeless. The caption for the picture reads: Lena, from Nizhnekolymsk, in an underground fish and food store. It reminds us of how expressions of tradition, reality and survival in one place can appear alien in another. Nizhnekolymsk is a settlement within the Polar Circle, in the north of the Sakha Republic. The village is at risk of disappearing. The storage space Lena is standing in is in danger of flooding – because the river bank where it lies is being eroded due to climate change. “If we speak about the inhabitants of the Arctic and look, for example, at Nizhnekolymsk, life there is quite harsh,” Slava Lyu-fa explains. “Electricity comes from a generator, and for supplies and food you have to travel by river for about 29 kilometres.”

Lyu-fa’s Inner Distance series is the outcome of a journey along the Kolyma, a river over 2000 kms long, which serves as transport route, source of food, border, connection and wellspring. At the same time, it reveals the fragility of life: houses are close to collapse, climate change and human intervention are changing the landscape, the familiar rhythms of the river and the ice are becoming unstable. “The river gives life, but at the same time it takes land away,” the photographer summaries. “This contradiction is very important for the project.”
The images represent a homage to the people of Yakutia. To those who live in the far north and to those at home in the centre of the country. Lyu-fa observes them from the need to bring them closer to each other through his pictures. Surface-wise, the Sakha Republic is the largest subject of the Russian Federation: villages in the Arctic lie 2000 kilometres away from the capital – people are not only separated by physical distance, but also by their lack of knowledge about each other. The photographer wants to highlight, while at the same time limit, the inner distance: using cool lighting and subtle colours, he places his protagonists in settings that speak less of differences than of similarities. Lyu-fa says that he is aware that he can preserve stories through photography. He wants people to remember places that may well have disappeared within a couple of decades, those who had their homes there, and the families for whom an area provided work and livelihoods.

Four men sit at a table in a picture Lyu-fa took at the abandoned Meteorit aerological station on the Bear Islands. A portrait of Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary known for advocating openness and change during the final years of the Soviet Union, hangs on the wall. It is crumpled and faded, but it is still there. Perhaps that is precisely what continues to unite all Yakutia’s inhabitants today: their shared memory of the past.

Slava Lyu-fa’s series was submitted by Misha Domozhilov, who is part of this year’s group of international LOBA nominators.