Restricted Areas #12, 2013

Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko explores the complexities of the relationship between man and nature in his documentary practice. The present work, Submarine, comes from the photographer’s renowned Restricted Areas project documenting former sites of technological progress. Divorced from place and time, the dazzling purity of the white snow creates a vivid aura around the depicted object, evoking a sense of stillness and silence, at once eerie and serene. The series, which won the European Publishers Award for Photography in 2015, illustrates these former Soviet sites, forsaken to nature’s imposing will. These ‘secret cities’ provide an insight into an otherwise unmapped, forgotten and untraceable world.