Places

Every place has something to tell through pictures. But my favourite places are a little off the main roads. It could be the Northern Territories, where wooden churches still stand in the same landscape as they did hundreds of years ago. Or a large salt lake, hidden in the ancient, endless steppe near the Kazakhstan border.

For many years, I have been fascinated by Kalmykia — a piece of Tibet that seems to have drifted to the banks of the Volga. In the 1940s, the people of Kalmykia were forcibly deported by Stalin’s regime, but they found the strength to return a decade later and preserve their cultural identity.

While travelling in Dagestan, I tried to show its many layers of life: the breathtaking beauty of the mountains and the poverty of village life, the traces of Soviet ideology and the signs of ancient Zoroastrian beliefs.