On 26 December 2013, Arbugaeva flew across to Khodovarikha and turned up on Korotki’s doorstep. “I’d brought some oranges, champagne and a parrot with me as a New Year’s present,” she says. “When I landed, Vyacheslav came out of the house with his dog, and I asked him: ‘Do you remember me?’ He said he did, and so I asked if I could stay for two or three weeks. He said he didn’t mind and helped me to unload my bags. ‘This will be your room,’ he said. ‘I’ll bring you some firewood and snow to melt for drinking water.’ And that was it. I stayed. Slowly I started to observe his daily life.”
Arbugaeva stayed with Korotki for a couple of weeks, photographing him at work and at rest as well as homing in on incidental details. The result is a series of images that paint a picture of what life might be like for this man in one of the most inhospitable parts of the world. Most noticeable is Arbugaeva’s use of light and shadow, and her images have a cinematic, almost otherworldly, mystical feel to them.
“This dreamlike style is something I can’t control – it just comes out of me,” she says. “I often see things in an almost exaggeratedly romantic, overly dramatised way… in a similar way to when you fall in love (I’m not saying I’m in love with this man, of course not), you create this image of the person with bright colours, and build stories around the person about his or her past or future. The reality might not exactly match my perception of that person, but… Vyacheslav is like a weather magician who lives in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the world. It’s as though he uses these secret knobs to turn on the aurora borealis, the stars and the wind. I like that fantasy.”
