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Zona: Siberian Prison Camps
 
 
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Zona: Siberian Prison Camps (Hardcover)

by Carl de Keyzer (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £29.95
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 160 pages
  • Publisher: Trolley; illustrated edition edition (1 April 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0954264843
  • ISBN-13: 978-0954264840
  • Product Dimensions: 30.5 x 24.6 x 2.5 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 476,457 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #69 in  Books > Art, Architecture & Photography > Photography > Subjects & Types > Travel > Europe

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Product Description

Synopsis

It's official. The gulags of Siberia are no more. Solzhenitsin'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 endeavour. 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.

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 colour, 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.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Pictures that speak for themselves?, 18 Aug 2007
By Alexa (Midlothian United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
The images in this book are arresting, startling, unsettling.But unless you read it carefully, they can also be misleading. The opening pages are full of colour, with black-clad prisoners marching past brightly painted murals with a religious theme, or outside an adminstration block ornamented with fantastic metal sculptures (made, apparently, by the prisoners themselves). The result is surreal - a sort of Disneyland with convicts! It contrasts sharply with images of delapidation and deprivation later in the book, and it is only by cross-referencing the photograph numbers in the index that one learns why - the former were all taken at the 'show camp': the place foreign journalists are taken to when they ask to see "a prison camp".

De Keyzer's genius is in persuading a general in charge of certain camps (the 'third category of camps he never gets to see) in the Krasnoyarsk region that it would be a good idea to let him visit as many camps as he wishes in the region, 'to demonstrate how things have changed since Soviet times'. In the process he engages willingly in colluding with the camp authorities' self-publication; for example, waiting three days for "transport arrangements" before arriving at a camp where the paint is fresh, and allowing prisoners to be arranged and posed for him (for example, photographing a 'tennis game' with no ball, and a library where the 'readers' have their books upside down!)

This is certainly the price to be paid for being able to take these photographs at all, but since they are not the 'slices of reality' they appear to be, the book would have been the better if the context of the pictures had accompanied them, rather than relying on de Keyzer's essay at the back.

However, this is saying that the book could easily have been better; the photos themselves remain a remarkable collection of images of a strange world, where prisoners who can persuade their families to join them, can serve their sentences whilst living with their family in houses in the 'prison settlement' (unaccompanied prisoners remain living in barracks), and the walls of a young offender's refectory decorated with gayly painted murals of gladitorial contests!

It is worth taking time to see this collection of images - you will not have seen anything like it. The falsity of the reportage is an issue, but the expressions on the faces of the prisoners - particularly the shaven-headed teenagers in the youth camps - speak of a reality that no carefuly staged presentation can disguise.
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