After presenting the recipients of the 2017 W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund in Humanistic Photography awards on October 18, 2017 (Daniel Garcia Castro, Edmund Clark and Alex Majoli), The Eye of Photography joins the organization and features the works of the prize finalists.
Running 2031 km from Yakutsk to Magadan, the “Kolyma Highway” has a dark past. With untold numbers of Gulag prisoners buried beneath the highway, the Road of Bones continues to claim new lives every year. In literally one of the coldest parts of the inhabited world, the Kolyma region’s residents seem to exist in pure defiance, it is this way of life, these people surviving under extreme conditions in the shadow of a gruesome history, that I wish to engage with and portray.
I wish to go back to Siberia during the coldest months, from January to April 2018. This time of year temperatures go down to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit, and human life is tested to the limits. Spending the entire winter in Siberia, my aim is to document life as it is lived every day on the border between civilization and a wild, unforgiving nature.
Jacob Aue Sobol
Jacob Aue Sobol (b. 1976) is a Danish photographer, currently based in Copenhagen.
