French photographer Céline Clanet spent five years travelling across the frozen tundra of the Kola Peninsula.
Her images criscross three parallel worlds of the post-Soviet Arctic: the area’s vast (широкий) military infrastructure, mining and industry, and among them both, communities of the indigenous (местный) Sami people trying to maintain their traditional lifestyles.
“The complex history of that region makes it unique,” Clanet says. “It is a fragmented (раздробленная) polar land, shared between three worlds that coexist but do not meet.”
The photographs she took are featured in her latest photobook, Kola, which blends portraits and dreamy, pastel-hued landscapes.
Clanet has long been interested in the far north and she spent a decade studying Lapland, Europe’s ancient but largely unknown (неизвестный) Arctic region, before turning her attentions to Russia.
Kola will be published by Éditions Loco on 19 October.
