Evgenia Arbugaeva
[6] At the age of eight, and at the fall of the Soviet Union, she and her family moved to Yakutsk, "the coldest city on earth" and a place that she found much less visually appealing.[1][2][3][5][8] Despite the decline of the town and the difficult life there (which drove her host family to plan their own departure), her photos in this project are "bright and whimsical, their compositions and vivid colours redolent of the books she read there as a child".[9] Arbugaeva's other photography projects have included nomadic Yakut reindeer herders in Sakha,[5] and "Amani", a sequence of fictionalized images set on an abandoned anthropological research station on a former German coffee plantation in Tanzania.[1] Arbugaeva is the 2013 winner of Leica's Oskar Barnack Award for her work in Tiksi,[2] for which she also received a Magnum Foundation International Emergency Fund grant in 2012.[3][5] In 2018, National Geographic named her as one of their four inaugural Media Innovation Fellows, funding her to photograph the people and economic changes on Russia's northern coast.