In the silent landscape, a low crackle accompanied the shutter clicks of Nadav Kander’s camera. It was an urgent sound, one he couldn’t ignore: it signalled the ghostly presence of radiation. For his latest project, Dust, now on display at the Flowers Gallery in London, England, the photographer travelled to an area on the border between Russia and Kazakhstan. Until 2006, it was off the map. “Google Earth discovered these secret cities that the maps had never shown,” says Kander. “They had been closed for many years.”
“I made one of what I thought would be four or five trips there,” says Kander. “It turned out to only be two, because I was arrested each time; once you’ve been arrested in Russia twice, you don’t want to push it by going back again.” The top image shows a telephone exchange in Kurchatov, one of the Soviet Union’s ‘closed cities’, built using gulag labor, it was the spot chosen by the head of Stalin’s secret police as a base for scientists in the state nuclear testing program. In 1949, the USSR tested its first nuclear bomb sixty kilometers away. While the area had been described as uninhabited, there was a large civilian town within two hundred kilometers of the site.
At the Semipalatinsk Test Site, or the Polygon (middle photo), hundreds of atomic bombs were detonated in secret until the program ended in 1989. Scientists honed the weapons and monitored their effect on the local population. “You shouldn’t be there when it’s windy because you can ingest the dust: the half-life of radiation is at least ten thousand years,” says Kander. “I wore white overalls so that no dust from the earth touched my skin.” There are few marks on the landscape to reveal what happened there. “You can catch a train for ten hours in that area and nothing changes,” he says. “It’s very flat; the only thing that reminds you of what this place is, in the beauty of the quietness, is this ticking of the Geiger counter on your belt, a memory of what went on there. Several hundred bombs blowing up, and now all you can hear is the wind and the grass and the clicking.”
Dust includes images of Priozersk, where long-distance missiles were tested in secrecy: it is now leased by Kazakhstan to the Russian military and used as a base for the development of anti-ballistic missile systems. “Priozersk is still a closed town. How I found access I’m not even sure myself; it was a person we found on the Internet who met us and took us in.” He was not interested in the restricted parts of the town, however. “The parts that I was interested in were the parts that were destroyed, that were to do with the Cold War.” For Kander, the ruins took on greater meaning. “The Cold War and the relentless quest for nuclear armaments created many of the ruins that we see here,” he writes in the exhibition monograph. “They now stand as monuments to the near ruin of mankind.”
“It’s a way of looking to our past,” says Kander. “While we often think of a ruin as something beautiful and romantic, something that conjures melancholy; these are ruins to a very dark past, and not that way at all.” Yet he wasn’t there to record history: “I’m not a documentarian, this is a human condition, for all humans,” he says. “We have savagery, we have envy, we have shadow. There are parts of ourselves that we don’t like. I’m not pointing my finger at anybody and saying this has happened to only these people.”
The heart of the project, for Kander, is “about vulnerability and shadow”. In a video interview recorded for the Flowers Gallery, he describes the moment he first saw the statue overlooking the lake. “We suddenly saw this statue, fully bathed in light, and by the time I’d set up the light was diminishing and travelling up her body. I photographed these pictures… This was a children’s campground, and I was told that the statue once held an oar.”
Kander won the prestigious Prix Pictet award in 2009 for his project following the Yangtze river in China from booming Shanghai to the rural Qinghai province, past the millions displaced by development. As part of Dust, he visited a dried-up section of the Aral Sea (bottom photo), where the missiles tracked in Priozersk were launched. In his interview for Flowers, he says: “I think if one was fitting my work into a genre, it would be the man-altered landscape; the portrait of man, and the palm print of man. How we exist on our planet, how we exist with our surroundings, how we deal with our surroundings.”
Kander has picked the top image as his favorite, telling The Guardian: “The front is almost perfect, but the side is crumbled away. It is that yin and yang that points to truth. There is never beauty without imperfection.” Yet he refuses to romanticise the crumbling buildings. “You can look at these things intellectually and think about ‘the ruin’, how throughout art history the ruin has been painted to be a window to the past, but when you sink down and think more how these things in front of you feel, they echo vulnerability, loneliness, and melancholy,” says Kander. “These are broken structures sitting there all alone: they don’t get heated, they’re out in the elements without a roof.”
Rico says you can find the same stuff here in the US, and Australia...
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