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Satellites - Reviews
"(...) The stunning photographs in "Satellites" are riddled with conflict and despair. The nasty realities of a collapsed empire are laid bare in its pages. Bendiksen spent seven years examining the margins of the defunct Soviet Union, traveling to Transdniester, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, the Ferghana Valley, the Jewish Autonomous Region and an area near the Kazakh Steppe, where a junkyard of space debris exists and the cows occassionally die after eating the toxic grass. Bendiksen, who's Norwegian but based in New York City, calls these places "half-forgotten enclaves and restless territories." Incongruities, absurdities and capitalism abound in this bleak narrative.
In one frame from Transdniester, pictures of Lenin and Marx hang next to the bar as a man drinks by himself. In another, a stripper grabs a pole as she entertains an audience of men and women. Both shots are suffused with natural colors and intense red, creating an almost psychedelic light. Ambient light is an important part of this story for Bendiksen, who possesses a poetic and contemporary style that uses unusual perspectives. As he travels this forlorn road, the light seemingly encases the war-torn buildings and the weary faces of his subjects.
One of the more fascinating outposts Bendiksen visited was the Jewish Autonomous Region in Siberia. Created by Josef Stalin in 1928, it was the first modern homeland for Jews. At its height, there were thousands of Jews. Today, almost all have immigrated to Israel. What little Jewish life is left, falls to Bendiksen to chronicle. He does so expertly. The sadness is inescapable. (...)"
Adam Goldman, Associated Press
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"(...) Text is also a vital component in Jonas Bendiksen's Satellites (Aperture), a compact little volume that touches down briefly in six isolated, stunted, and largely lawless regions of the former Soviet Union, from tiny Transdniester on the Black Sea to the former Jewish Autonomous Region in Siberia. 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
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"History is written in the margins. Several of the six regions depicted in Satellites used to be strategic hinterlands of the sprawling Soviet empire, but upon its dissolution, regional conflicts played out like mini-apocalypses. Amazingly, three of them are self-perceived sovereign states: Transdniester, Abkhazia and Nagorno-Karabakh. We may not see their nameplates at the UN very soon however, for they are still caught up in the grumble of geopolitical interests.
Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen has traversed them for years, in which time the center of the former Soviet system reconfigured its stratagem even further afield. Left on their own, with arbitrary borders leftover from Stalinist control and ethnic and religious tensions still unresolved, these territories each charted its own peculiar trajectory. Bendiksen tells their stories through atmospheric and enigmatic interiors of bars and small homes, or painful vistas of decimated towns, stripped to rebuild the victors' town nearby. Like pessimistic versions of Calvino's Invisible Cities, these regions are lyrical in their histories, and yield hallucinations of everyday existence. The Jewish Autonomous Region, a chilly border province with China, hosted no Semitic history until the 1920s. On a frozen street there, two anonymous figures struggle or play. From Abkhazia, a former resort town bombed into its own dusk, comes a magnificent tableau involving a peacock, a stuffed bear and a slouching man, each seeming to ask a poignant and absurd question of the viewer.
The structure of the book is punctuated by stills of Soviet rocket launch, which projects us into what seems like a dreamlike tomorrow, especially in the final section. In the Kazakh Steppe region, Soyuz boosters and other hulking spacecraft detritus land amidst villages and farmlands. Residents salvage what they can for tools and resale, despite the corrosive fuel that also lands there. The cover image, suffused with white butterflies, captures the near-future irreality as no other shot in the book.
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
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"After going to Russia in 1998 as a fresh faced 20-year-old, Magnum photographer Jonas Bendiksen became captivated with the fringes of the former Soviet Empire. Intrigued by how the country's political meltdown had affected its people, he spent the following five years following and documenting their lives. Starting off in Transdniester, a bleak state that has a cache of over 50,000 ex-military weapons, Bendiksen then moved on to Abkhazia, Russia's forgotten beach paradise, before roaming Kazakhstan with scavangers on the lookout fo falling space craft boosters to dismantle. Absorbing on every level, this photo travelogue serves up surreal beauty and depressing reality that will intrigue everyone who picks it up."
"Book of the Month" featured review, Dazed & Confused
Hardcover: 156 pages
Publisher: Aperture
Languages: English, French, Italian and Dutch
ISBN: 159711023X
Dimensions: 235 x 183 x 20mm
Buy the English version:
» Buy at Amazon.com
» Buy at Aperture
» Buy at Barnes & Noble
Buy the French version:
» Buy at Amazon.fr
Buy the Italian version:
» Buy at Contrasto
Buy the Dutch version:
» Buy at bol.com