Snow Fox Works, 2022. Edition of 500 copies.
Handmade 3-gate around the book cover, open swiss binding, additional Laporello information booklet in the back cover pocket containing captions, maps and legend. 152 pp., 71 color illustrations, 285 x 210 mm. Photographs by Fyodor Telkov, Sergey Poteryaev. Text by Natalia Konradova. Design by Anna Moseeva.
From 2012 to 2014 Fyodor Telkov and Sergey Poteryaev travelled the regions of north Russia, documenting the lives of Mansi, Selkup, Nenets and Khanty native people. The book tells a complicated story of interaction between cultures, gradual disappearance of the old ways and inevitable changes driven by global processes.
The wild beauty of harsh northern nature and traditional life in a herding camp represent only one end of the spectrum. In this project the photographers tried to capture the whole range of stages of transition to ‘modern’ urban life on the North Line. The sequence joins together the portraits of local people of different ages, professions, life stories; landscapes in the changing seasons, interiors of peoples homes and still lifes that represent the whole diversity of states of this transition. Those details of everyday life uncover new layers of meanings and the complexity of this process that melts together religious and cultural influences, traditional habits with modern lifestyle to create new forms, some of which germinate into new culture, but some are short-lived and ephemeral. The importance to capture and document these states is vital to understanding not only the perception of belonging of these people, but our own quest for identity.
