SPEAKER_01: Conjure an image of the Russian tundra, Siberia, as far north as you can go before you hit the Arctic Ocean. Your image probably looks like a snowy whiteout. You might picture stark, forbidding ice-scapes, devoid of color and life. But through the lens of National Geographic explorer and photographer Evgenia Arbogaeva, it's a wonderland, bristling with people and their stories, like, for example, the keepers of the remote weather stations that line Russia's Arctic coast.
SPEAKER_00: When I was a kid, my dad would bring me to visit a meteorological station, and I wanted to be in all of them. I just wanted to see how it is to live there.
SPEAKER_01: So as an adult, she hopped on an icebreaker that brought supplies to those isolated outposts.
SPEAKER_00: I saw this station that was from the 30s that haven't been renovated since then, and was all surrounded by sand. And then there's this man comes out with his bright blue eyes, total loner, unable to kind of make connections with people because he's just too overwhelmed by all of us.
SPEAKER_01: The man's name was Slava. He was in his 60s, and he lived alone at the weather station, an hour's helicopter ride from the nearest settlement. Right away, Evgenia was drawn to him.
SPEAKER_00: He was kind of trying to hide almost from everyone, but I could tell that he is a real thing. He is of the Arctic, of the nature.
SPEAKER_01: So how did you, I mean, if he's afraid of people or not good at making connections, how did you convince him to let you come and spend time with him?
SPEAKER_00: Well, as they're unloading all the supplies and all these people from meteorological organizations, and they're like, okay, Slava, you know, give us the charts, blah, blah, blah, all these things. And he's overwhelmed by all these questions. And I'm there and I'm like, oh, what's this? What's this in the distance? He's like, let's go, I'll show you. So he took me just, I think he was happy that to get away from all these people.
SPEAKER_01: Evgenia followed Slava for a photo series called Weatherman. She captured the storm battered wooden cottage where he lives, his lonely march to log data in sub-freezing weather, and the antique looking radio that's one of his few links to the outside world.
SPEAKER_00: I learned so much from him. What I saw in him is this total honesty about who he is and acceptance of who he is. And also understanding the value of the land in a sense that he found the spot that makes him happy. And he is this land. So he managed to get into the point where he is this sea and he is this peninsula as much as he is Slava.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Peter Gwynn, editor at large at National Geographic, and this is Overheard, a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, why it's impossible for Evgenia Arbogaeva to look away from the Arctic. She tells us about hunters looking for the tusks of ancient mammoths melting from the permafrost, and about nomadic reindeer herders following the rhythms of their ancestors, and why this unique environment leaves humans both awed and afraid.
SPEAKER_01: More after the break. This story starts on the edge of Siberia in a town called Tixi.
SPEAKER_00: It's a small town on the shore of Laptev Sea in the Russian Arctic in the Republic of Yakutia. And when I was growing up there, it was about 12,000 people living there. So it was pretty big. It was a famous and important seaport on the Northern Sea route. And during Soviet time, there were all these people coming, working there, military people, scientists, seamen, and it was quite a vibrant community. And then, so I grew up there. My parents were teachers in high school. And then after fall of Soviet Union, everybody just kind of, it was this massive wave of migration. And we moved to the city called Yakutsk, which is the capital of Yakutia. And officially the coldest city inhabited by people. The coldest city inhabited by people. Yes. Right now, I just talked to my dad just now this morning. He said it's minus 55. Oh my gosh.
SPEAKER_01: Wow.
SPEAKER_00: Celsius.
SPEAKER_01: But Tixi, was it as cold as that? Yeah, it's not as cold as Yakutsk.
SPEAKER_00: It's a harsher climate because of the winds. The winds are really strong and blizzards sometimes last for a few days and you just, you literally cannot even go out from your house. As a kid, it was great because you don't go to school.
SPEAKER_01: Even snow days in the Arctic. Yeah, the blizzard days we call it because you're, you just, you know, if you're, especially
SPEAKER_00: if you're a small kid, you come out of the house and you literally will be just flying in the tundra because the winds are so strong.
SPEAKER_01: So tell me how you came to photography then from Tixi to Yakutsk. You know, I know from working with photographers, the cold was not the friend of the camera. So how did, when did that start?
SPEAKER_00: When I was 15, I was an exchange student in Connecticut, in the US and I took photography class and I was just blown away right away. And no, I spent a lot of time in the dark room. And then when I came back to Yakutsk, I thought, okay, I have to continue. So I started working in the local newspapers and developing my film because there's not much places to develop a film. And I was developing my film in the dark room in the morgue. Morgue is where you keep that body. Yeah. Wait a minute.
SPEAKER_01: So you're developing your pictures in like a, in the morgue of like the city morgue?
SPEAKER_00: Of the hospital. Yes. Of the hospital. And there was, you know, there was no places to develop film and there was this guy who was taking pictures of dead people and corpses in the hospital and he had this dark room. And so I was going there and was developing my film.
SPEAKER_01: Was that weird? I mean, was it, was it creepy? I mean, is there like a cadaver over here? I was very much focused on developing my film.
SPEAKER_00: Right.
SPEAKER_01: Right. So how did you take it to the next level? What comes next?
SPEAKER_00: When I, I went to study in Moscow in this Moscow International University, I was studying management, art management. And then I went to travel with reindeer herders and I was working as a, you know, I was living in with the reindeer herders.
SPEAKER_01: So how do you make that connection? You went from art management to reindeer herding. That was like, that was a big leap there.
SPEAKER_00: In Yakutsk, I mean, it's, you know, we're so close to indigenous cultures. Most of them are nomads and reindeer herders. So I was aware of them and I was photographing them at the celebrations that are happening in Yakutsk and also a family of reindeer herders or good family friend of ours. So when I came back after university in Moscow, I just joined our friends and I started migrating with them. What does that look like?
SPEAKER_01: What do you mean migrating?
SPEAKER_00: It's a, well, reindeer herders, they have a herd of about 2000 reindeer and some of them live in the tombs, some of them live in the tents and they follow the herd. So they migrate every, depending on the season, they migrate every week or less, depending on if it's winter or summer.
SPEAKER_01: Let's kind of skip ahead a little bit to going back to Tixi. How did that come about?
SPEAKER_00: So after living with reindeer herders, at some point I did start photographing because it was just so amazing, some things that I saw there. And at that point I'm thinking, okay, this is what I want to do. And I want to be a photographer. And I go to New York to study photography in International Center of Photography, a one year program. Then I stay in New York for a little bit and I'm being completely overwhelmed by everything that is happening in New York. There's amazing art, amazing artists around, the speed of the city. I love it and I hate it at the same time as all New York, as all people who live in New York. And then I think, okay, I have to go back to Tixi. I remember that longing that I had all those years and I thought to go and explore it as a photographer.
SPEAKER_01: This is how many years later? 19 years later. Okay. Is this the first time you've been back? Yeah, it's the first time I'm back since we left.
SPEAKER_00: What did that feel like?
SPEAKER_00: It felt so strange. Yeah, I had very strong emotions, especially because now, as I mentioned before, when I lived there, there was 12,000 people living in town and now it's only 4,000. So the majority of buildings in town are abandoned. So it looks very scary and I was just really, really sad. I thought that I'm not going to take any pictures because it's just too sad to photograph.
SPEAKER_01: That's so ironic because the pictures that I've seen that you took of Tixi are not sad.
SPEAKER_00: Well, my first trip after wandering this empty street, I went to the shore of the sea and I was sitting there just kind of looking at the horizon and I saw a family by the bonfire. And there was this girl who was just throwing stones in the water and they were very quiet. And I could feel that we're in the same emotional wavelength somehow. And we started talking and the more we started talking, the more I thought, this girl, she's still here. She still has her reality here in Tixi. How does she seize the town? Next trip, I came back and I already was following Tanya, this girl. And she opened her vision of town to me, which was so similar to how I remember it. So I thought, wow, so it doesn't really matter. If you love a place and if you're a kid, you don't see that all this ruins start to be a playground. It becomes a haunted house full of stories to explore rather than a relic or a reminder of fallen empire.
SPEAKER_01: What was it like to go to these places with her and you're seeing it through her eyes, but you're also seeing it in your memory?
SPEAKER_00: Because my childhood in Tixi ended so abruptly so that it wasn't like I was growing out of it. I had this beautiful world and then I was taking away from it. And so there was no closure and I was just so happy to be with Tanya and to become a kid again in this place and have enough time to play again in the tundra and to run again trying to touch Aurora or things like this. Trying to touch Aurora.
SPEAKER_01: Is that a game that kids play in the orchestra? I want to play that game.
SPEAKER_00: Making wishes or digging a hole in the tundra and writing your wishes and putting your wishes in there hoping that they will all come true and things like this. And because it was just me and her and her friends and no adults around, I just was so free to be a kid again as well.
SPEAKER_01: What does the Aurora Borealis look like in Tixi?
SPEAKER_00: It is a part of daily life. When I was a kid and when Tanya was in Tixi, you just see Aurora on your way to school because in winter it's polar night so you don't see the sun at all for a few months. So you go to school and you just watch Aurora. What is it? What does it look like? It can be different. It can be just green or just white or just yellow or it can be all kinds of colors. Purple, yellow, green. It depends. It can be very different. It can be a little bit. It can completely explode in the sky. It's moving.
SPEAKER_01: It's like shimmering and moving across you. Yeah, it's moving.
SPEAKER_00: It's like this. It's alive.
SPEAKER_01: Why is it important to you to focus on the Arctic right now? I know you come from the Arctic and you obviously have a deep love for it, but what are you thinking about right now about the situation that the Arctic faces?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, there's so many things going on around the world but in the Arctic especially. I cannot take pictures there now. There's just so many changes and so many things that I know they need to be photographed now like we used to look at it with awe, right? Now we're looking at it and we're scared.
SPEAKER_01: Are you scared?
SPEAKER_00: I'm both in awe and scared.
SPEAKER_01: So one story that you wrote, I think it may have been your first story for National Geographic was looking at the mammoth tusks and I think in a way that story speaks to the changes in the Arctic. That was such an interesting sort of way to look at how the climate is changing.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that was a very interesting assignment and my first one. The story takes place in this uninhabited islands in the Laptev Sea and because of the erosion and permafrost thaw there is this mammoth tusks that are emerged from the land.
SPEAKER_01: So these are woolly mammoths that were living in this region and then like they're frozen there or how are the mammoths there I guess is my question.
SPEAKER_00: Well the mammoth used to live there and then their carcasses and their bones are preserved so well because of permafrost and because now permafrost is sowing all these remains of mammoth come out and what happens now is it becomes they call it like this tusk rush. So there is all these people. Like a gold rush? Like a gold rush but tusk rush. Because after the ban of international trade of elephant ivory, Chinese market needed to have a replacement for the material. So mammoth now with emergence of all these mammoth tusks in Siberia, this is now a material the carvers are working with. It's not illegal to use mammoth tusks.
SPEAKER_01: It's not.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah. But there's it's a gray kind of area still. And you know sometimes we were when we're digging out the skull of a mammoth and you just I was just standing there thinking wow this is so scary. What's going to happen? Because we were also when I was on the Bolshoi-Lachovsky and I had a GPS and we had an older mammoth. It was a bigger map. So that was 2013 and I had a map of 2008 on my GPS and I was standing on the edge of the island and the map of 2008 was showing that I'm very much inland. And that's when I was just struck by the difference of the border of the edge of the island.
SPEAKER_01: Because it had because it the permafrost had eroded. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Oh wow. And some of the islands scientists predicted in my life in my lifetime they won't be there anymore.
SPEAKER_01: The island will be gone.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah. So what's next? What do you what do you want to do next?
SPEAKER_00: I keep working. I just finished three new stories in the Arctic. And these are in a way that weatherman was the first chapter of the stories and now I produced three more chapters. And I'll just keep creating my necklace with different beads and each story as a bead. I keep working in the Arctic.
SPEAKER_01: Is there any particular image that you just can't get out of your head that would be your dream to photograph?
SPEAKER_00: Well right now I really want to be able to find a way to photograph tundra in the way that people could really see it because you know tundra is just as you know in some areas they call it Arctic desert right so it's just a very empty space but it's not and it's the world of its own and so I'm struggling I'm trying to figure out now how do I capture that tundra as space. It was a backdrop almost visually always for a story unfolding and now I really want to focus on like this natural spaces that are protagonists of their own.
SPEAKER_01: Wow. Well, Evgenia Arbogaeva, thank you very much.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01: To see more of Evgenia's work, her photos from Tixi and her National Geographic stories about mammoth ivory hunters and chasing rare butterflies in Malaysia, check out the links in our show notes. You can also find her photographs on our Instagram feed at Nat Geo. Evgenia is working on a new documentary set in a region of Siberia that features some of the world's biggest gatherings of walruses. You can find links for all that in the show notes. They're right there in your podcast app.
SPEAKER_01: If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us in your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That's the best way to support overheard and hear more great stories. Go to Nat Geo dot com forward slash explore to subscribe. Overheard at National Geographic is produced by Brian Gutierrez, Jacob Pinter, Marci Thompson and Alana Strauss. Our senior editor is Eli Chen. Robert Molesky edited this episode. Our senior producer is Carla Wills, our executive producer of audio is Devar Aralan, who produced this episode. Our fact checkers are Robin Palmer and Julie Beer. Michelle Harris fact checked this episode. Our copy editor is Amy Kolczak. Hans Del Sous sound designed this episode and composed our theme music. This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. The National Geographic Society is committed to eliminating and protecting the wonder of our world and funds the work of National Geographic explorer Evgenia Arbogaeva. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences. And I'm your host, Peter Gwynn. Thanks for listening and see you all next time.
