Jonas Bendiksen: Satellites: Photographs From The Fringes Of The Former Soviet Union

Jonas Bendiksen: Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union

This culmination of a fascinating seven-year photographic journey takes viewers through the countries and enclaves once held in orbit by the immense gravity of Moscow, the nucleus of the Soviet empire. Now each region is on its own in a chaotic political environment, sometimes without diplomatic recognition from neighbors, much less the international community. Abkhazia, an unrecognized country on the Black Sea, was once the natural pearl of the empire, where bellicose generals and productive factory managers came to relax. The spacecraft crash zones between Russia and Kazakhstan reveal a Soviet-inflected version of the entrepreneurial spirit. In Transdniester, a breakaway region of Moldova that survives by functioning as a giant black market for illicit traffic in all manner of goods, from leftover Soviet munitions to bootlegged booze, Bendiksen was expelled on the grounds that he was a "protagonist in an international spy ring." These 62 hauntingly beautiful and often arresting color photographs unsentimentally reveal the often grim circumstances in these half-forgotten regions, uniformly poor and polluted, and often politically unstable. We may not hear much about them today, but we will certainly hear more as the fall of the Iron Curtain continues to reverberate throughout the region.Review"No matter how brilliant, Bendiksen's captionless photographs--stark streetscapes, desolate landscapes, claustrophobic interiors--can't begin to describe the bloody history or current collapse of these self-styled sovereign states, but his brief introductions to each splinter republic do the trick succinctly and with wit." -- Vince Aletti --Photograph Magazine"From Trans-Dniester, a region of the Republic of Moldova whose independence remains an issue of contention, to the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan in Russia's far eastern federal district at China's border, the Norwegian-born lensman captures people in the midst of forging a new identity from a turbulent past and the unsure future that awaits." -- Paul Moakley --NewsweekJonas Bendiken's Satellites is, by all accounts, a classic piece of photojournalism that is brought together in a totally, modern package. It reminds us that, despite the sophistication of modern technology, which creates spacecraft looking to the heavens for answers, we should be looking for answers here, on Earth." -- Michael Grieve --HotShoe International"Like most important international photojournalism, this work introduces most of us to the people who are left in the wake of much larger global influences. And this is also the conundrum of such compelling projects: to us they are the forgotten exotic ones; for them, this is their lives." -- Alan Rapp --Photo-Eye: The International Magazine of Photography Books"Bendikesen's book conveys images of destruction, poverty and desperation, amplified by the gloomy times he chooses to press the shutter: dark evenings, winter and foggy days, of all... But there is also a certain warmth and strength depicted on people's faces, as well as the promise of the future to come ... Satellites is a dense and beautiful, yet emotional, probe of forgotten lands." -- Michaela Freeman --State of Art