Aleksey Kondratyev was the recipient of the 2017 Fujifilm/Young Talent Award for this essay. This honor recognizes photographers under 25 and grants $5,000 from Fujifilm to continue the work.
Aleksey Kondratyev
Ice Fishers
[ FUJIFILM/YOUNG TALENT AWARD 2017 WINNER ]
For generations, Kazakh fishers have set out on to the frozen Ishim River in the hope of catching fish beneath the ice. The Ishim flows through the country’s capital, Astana, a high-rise, futuristic city that was built essentially from scratch in the 1990s when Kazakhstan started to benefit from the exploitation of its oil reserves. It’s supposed to be an emblem of post-Soviet modernity, a hallmark of the country’s nationhood.
Many of these fishermen venture on to the ice, braving temperatures that often reach -40 degrees (north-central Kazakhstan is the second coldest populated region in the world, after Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia). While they fish, they protect themselves from the harsh weather with salvaged pieces of plastic, patched together from discarded packaging or rice bags that you can find outside markets selling western, Chinese and Russian goods.
I was interested in examining the aesthetic forms of these improvised protective coverings and the way in which they functioned as inadvertent sculptures. I chose to focus on the materials and their surfaces as signifers of underlying global in influence and the improvisation that occurs as a result of economic necessity.
Kazakhstan was once a nomadic country, and vestiges of that way of life still exist despite the country’s embracement of modernity. These ice fishers improvise and adapt to their environment in ingenious ways, just as their forebears did.
Short Bio
Aleksey Kondratyev (b. 1993 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan) is a photographer based in Los Angeles. His work examines the cultural conflation and diversion between the West and post-Soviet spheres of identity. Kondratyev’s work has been exhibited at the Neue Schule für Fotografie, Berlin, Germany, the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, the Museum of Contemporary Art Rome, Rome, Italy, and Galleria Foto-Forum in Bolzano, Italy. He recently completed a fellowship at FABRICA, Benetton’s Communication Center and is a current M.F.A. candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles
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The Fujifilm/Young Talent Award is supported by Fujifilm
I like this a lot mainly as it looks absolutely miserable.