Siberia: In the land of childhood summers

My childhood summers carry the scent of coal and wormwood. My sister and I spent them at our mother’s childhood home in Siberia, where the stove was heated, and potholes were patched with black coal. Our grandfather and all our other male relatives were miners. We traveled between relatives by tram. To reach the stop, we walked through the Aerodromny settlement — which had served as an airfield during the war — and crossed a wasteland overgrown with wormwood. It remains exactly the same to this day, except the coal miners are gone.

Close-up of yellow flowers on green stems with a soft, blurred background.
A person walking down a dirt path through a meadow filled with purple and yellow wildflowers, with a small town and cloudy sky in the background.
Tall birch trees with white bark and black markings in a forest with green leaves and sky visible through the canopy.
A foggy forest landscape with tall trees and dense greenery, and a large, hazy sky overhead.
An industrial building with a tall black metal tower, brick and metal structures, and a conveyor belt extending from the building, set against a cloudy sky with a foreground of rectangular green bushes and a lawn.
A rural landscape with a cloudy sky, houses scattered on a hillside, and a winding road in the distance. Tree branches and leaves frame the right side of the image.
A yellow tram is moving along a railway track through a grassy field filled with small purple and yellow flowers. The tram is under power lines, and there are trees and a building in the background under a partly cloudy sky.
Two girls walking through a forest with goats and sheep.
Cover of a magazine featuring a woman in a yellow dress with long blonde hair, smiling, wearing bold earrings, against a yellow background.

A story about our Siberian summers, published in the summer 2018 issue of Hingele Pai magazine.

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In the Land of the Childhood Summers, a joint exhibition by Laura and Kudres, was shown at the Museum of Photography in Tallinn from December 13, 2017 to February 5, 2018.

The photographs, taken with both digital and analogue cameras in Moscow and Prokopyevsk, follow Laura back to her mother's childhood home in a small Siberian coal town, where her grandfather and other male relatives once worked in the mines. The only thing that has changed since then, she says, is that mining is no longer the family's trade. Kudres, her husband and creative partner, approaches the town as an outsider trying to come to terms with Siberia's peculiarities.

Read about the exhibition
Two children stand in a forest observing a herd of goats grazing among trees and greenery.