During their journey across Ukraine, the photographer Niels Ackerman and his collaborator Sébastien Gobert, were tracking down toppled statues of the father of the October 1917 revolution who was still an aging emblem of the memory of those killed in the USSR. The two reporters tell their story in Looking for Lenin, a series of photographs now on view in Arles.
Sometimes a nation no longer tolerates a totem figure of its past. The country has changed. People take down the old symbols and file them away in strange drawers full of future dreams. It was just such a dream path that the two companions, Niels Ackerman and Sébastien Gobert followed in Ukraine, where they live. They have explored the effects of the “Revolution of Dignity,” a sort of catalyst for the toppling of Lenin and other Soviet monuments around the country since the 1990s, a movement that was later absorbed into the laws on decommunization. And, of course, there are some who don’t shrink away from symbolism: Lenin decapitated.