Project Info
“Siberia, The Far North”
Recently I had returned to some images I made in Russia a few years ago. These bleak images from Siberia, which I once gave up as lost due to an accident in development, have been brought back to life through careful scanning. They have a powerful sense of desolation and the intense atmosphere of a lost world.
Our helicopter landed in a cloud of snow on a vast ice barrier, amid a lunar landscape swept by an icy wind, we were in Sabetta on the north of Siberia.
To wander here is to face another dimension. This setting offers a completely different view from that given by a short assigned time to discover a space. It was therefore within a context dominated by instinct that I framed these landscapes.
In below-fifty degree temperature, armed with my small reflex camera, my land-dwellers gaze explored what constitutes a geological base destined for oil drilling.A few furtive silhouettes stirred in the dim light around the wind-swept encampments half-buried in snow.
The daily darkness envelops the white desert in a sooty and dense atmosphere. The lack of contrast distorts distance ratios.
There were very few things to grab the eye, and yet these images – which I am rediscovering after time – now appear to me to hold an incredible intensity. Is it the reminiscing to that long-ago time when photographing was for me a totally instinctive and free act?
The mystery emanating from these images mean much more to me than simply that moment spent on the edges of the Arctic. They signify the beginning of a photographic endeavor and that first step onto which we could build. A random chemical process, an unconsciousness of the image, and a lot of chance came together to create a series that is at once constructed and magical, consistent and surreal. To my now professional eye, these images of Sabetta resonate. Diving back into this work from the past, I am rediscovering a part of my innocence. While structuring these images I have discovered unexpected meaning.
By putting contradictory feelings side by side, I tried to recreate the rudeness and the fullness of this landscape. This story is a very personal, intimate and human portrait of these men and women.
Biography
Emile Hyperion Dubuisson was born in Paris, he attended ICP in 2007, in photography. Prior to that he studied cinema photography at Universite Paris 8 in France. His work reflects disciplines of both fields. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions most recently at the International Center of Photography, at Photo Espana in Spain, Humble Arts Foundation and the New York Photo Festival.