In the Northernmost point of the Eurasian continent, in a peninsula called the Taymirsky Dolgano-Nenetsky Autonomous District of Siberia, lives a dwindling population of ice nomads, composed of the Dolgans and the Nenets.
Photographer Francis Latreille an expert of polar expeditions since 1996, discovered the Dolgans for the first time in 1997, and started a twelve-year friendship with the Jarkov family. Under the tundra’s extreme climate conditions with temperature from minus 30 to minus 60 in harshest winters, the Dolgans live off hunting, fishing, fur trapping, reindeer breeding and some still practice shamanism, they are the true living witnesses of the effects of our planet’s climate change. The Dolgans who number around a thousand people, evolved from a mix of three northern Siberian cultures: the Yakut, Evenki and Nenets. Their name is derived from one of the tundra clans, meaning “people living in the middle reaches of the river”. The Dolgan herders move north in the spring and south in the autumn following traditional migration routes.
The reindeer grazes mainly lichen that grows one millimeter per year. During the winter grazing, due to global warming, Siberia’s snow melting and refreezing renders the digging for lichen under snow increasingly difficult for the reindeer, as the hardened condition of the snow affects the nutritional quality of the reindeer grazing, the Dolgan and the Nenet herders are forced to move every five or six days. The ice melting each summer has also accelerated increasing discoveries of mammoths, as powerful water rises in the river provoke landslide along the banks, and some Dolgans and Nenets have started trading mammoth bones and ivory, leading to smuggling to neighboring countries such as China. Francis Latreille who covered the finding in 1998 of a Mammoth that has been buried under ice for 20,000 years (Mammuthus Project) came back in 2006 for an exclusive coverage for National Geographic magazine about the discovery of a near perfect baby Mammoth that resurfaced after 40,000 years. There he met the finder Nenet Yuri Khudi who was instrumental in saving the baby Mammoth from the hands of traders and preserve it for the Shemanovsky Museum, where the grateful officials named the baby Mammoth after Yuri Khudi’s wife “Lyuba”.
While the Nenets build tent called “Tchoum”, similar to North America’s Indian Teepee, the Dolgans live in “Ballok”, sort of small huts mounted on sled runners, both mobile habitats are insulated with layers of reindeer skin. They burn coal in small stoves inside. Traditionally the Dolgans venerate spirits of nature, with Shamans acting as the intermediaries to communicate with the spirits. The sad thing is, the Dolgan language has been classified by UNESCO as a “potentially endangered” language. However, photography remains the best universal language, allowing Latreille to befriend the Dolgans and the Nenets and establish an intimate rapport with them. He went as far as to bring across the continent a heavy load (weighing forty kilos) of sail cloth to use as backdrop for his outdoor photographic studio. “The whole village showed up to have their pictures taken!” says Francis. Some stunning portraits resemble medieval knights from some ice land fortresses, reminiscent of the “Behind the Wall” characters of “Game of Thrones” Iceland.
For us city dwellers, we are fortunate that Francis brought us this heart-warming, humanist portrait of the Yuri Khudi family, his wife Lyuba and his son Kostia, their everyday life as they fledge ice from the river to boil water, and how they celebrate festivals in sled races, etc. These vanishing ice nomads, who with the bravery of modern-day heroes, struggle to perpetuate their traditional life between ice land and the merciless heaven, make us realize the beauty and the harshness of the great Northern wilderness, and the sacrifices we need to commit to if we want to preserve the purity and the beauty of nature, so that these brothers and sisters of ours out there can sustain their ancestral way of life.
Jean Loh, Curator
EXHIBITION
Dolgans-Neneth
Photographs by Francis Latreille
From January 17th to April 4th, 2015
La Galerie Beaugeste
200025 lane 210 taikang road building 5, studio 519
Shanghai, 200025
Chine
tel/fax: +86 21 6466 9012
http://www.beaugeste-gallery.com
http://www.francislatreille.com
