Zona.
Siberian Prison Camps.
Photographs by Carl De Keyzer.
Trolley, London, 2003. 160 pp., 90 color illustrations, 12x8½".
It's official. The gulags of Siberia are no more. Solzhenitsyn's nightmare of the absurd does not exist. The prisons are still there, of course, with plenty of customers, probably more than a million, such as the 15-year-old boy serving three and a half years for stealing two hamsters from a Moscow pet shop, or the mother of four who stole 12 cabbages - what can have possessed her? - and was rewarded with four years in Siberia.
So the inhuman lunacy still exists, but it is now officially apolitical. In reality it is an economic social endeavor. It does not pay to be a poor thief in Russia, since you will not have the resources to avoid the interminable train ride to the East when you are caught. Carl De Keyzer took that journey to photograph the prisons today. With two army colonels as his shadows, one to the left and one to the right, he photographed what he was allowed to see, and no more. But he has revealed a kind of winter wonderland, a Disneyland where all normal credibility is suspended - look, for example, at the tattoos in the photographs. "Where do they come from?" he asked. The answer came: "What tattoos? There are no tattoos. They are illegal." So they don't exist. Your eyes deceive you.
It has been said that the collective memory is black and white. In Zona, De Keyzer has elaborated on the brocaded fantasy of the Siberian prisons by using brilliant color, as if from a hallucinatory dream. Look at the faces, and then the eyes, of the prisoners. There is a Zen despair there, as if they were wearing lederhosen in a remarkable holiday camp. They tell a disturbing story.
The photographic work of Carl de Keyzer (Magnum, 1994) is a rare brand of documentation infused with a literary sensibility. The subject matter is former Soviet gulags in Siberia presently maintained as state prison camps. The names, such as Krasnoyarsk, Sosnovobosk, and Novobirusinsk, are as harsh sounding as the -50 degree reality of wintertime. De Keyzer is not clandestinely searching for 20th century atrocities hidden from the public eye. Rather, through a diplomatic demeanor and wily tenacity he manages to convince the military generals who run the various camps to allow him to photograph the daily rituals of prison life in all their melancholic absurdity. Trolley, the small but energetic publishing house based in London, needs to be commended here as well. The great majority of titles published by this young company address the trials and difficulties of the human condition, often extreme situations. They consistently marry profound content to elevated, respectful design, producing photography books that are elegant, educational, and most of all, important.
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