We’ve all imagined the remote, solitary life. A life of few interactions, surrounded by the silence and noise of the natural world. Evgenia Arbugaeva, an award-winning photographer who was born in the town of Tiksi in the Russian Arctic, found a man who lives such a life.
Vyacheslav Korotki, who is documented in Arbugaeva’s enigmatic series ‘Weather Man’, featured by British Journal of Photography, is a meteorologist based on a remote peninsula in northern Russia. After a chance meeting, Arbugaeva spent two weeks with Korotki, photographing his day to day life, his unique, simple surroundings, and the isolation of his existence.
Arbugaeva’s aesthetic is dark and fantasy-like. She says this style is “... something I can’t control – it just comes out of me. 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.”
Like the Arctic itself, the images never quite relinquish enough light, but Korotki, who is seen scribbling notes, walking from building to building, floating on his handmade boat on the bay of Barents Sea and breakfasting with his budgie, seems entirely content with his life in the wilderness, looking calm, even scholarly as he goes about his business. ‘Weather Man’ is a series intent on neither romanticising nor objectifying the isolated life. Instead - and strangely for the location of the shoot - it warms us to the human spirit.
See more of 'Weather Man' over at British Journal of Photography
evgeniaarbugaeva.com
