This entire project began in 2000, when a Magnum exhibition was held in Krasnoyarsk. It was part of a Soros Foundation project to organise exhibitions in the former Soviet republics, which brought an exhibition called East of Magnum to Siberia. The idea was to send a Magnum photographer to run a local workshop alongside the exhibition, so I went and taught fifteen local photographers.
I had first been to Krasnoyarsk in 1989, travelling east on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Back then, we weren't even allowed off the train; all we could see was the station. Many of these camps lie along the Trans-Siberian Railway, and I saw them from the train. So it was strange, ten years later, to be able to visit Krasnoyarsk, a city that had been closed until 1994 because of its nuclear facilities and an enormous aluminium factory.
Since I didn't know the region, I asked them to find subjects for me, and we went out photographing every day. One day, a local press photographer said we would visit a nearby prison camp, a former gulag. I was astonished that these places still existed; I was completely unprepared. We ended up at Camp No. 27, which I later understood was a kind of model camp, though it was still a labour camp. Each camp holds an average of 1,500–2,500 prisoners, as does Camp 27. Whenever an official ambassador or a foreign media team comes to Siberia without specific requests, they are taken to Camp 27.
What I saw there was quite astonishing. I had read Solzhenitsyn fifteen or twenty years earlier, so I had a very bleak idea of these camps, if they still existed at all: black-and-white, dark images, torture. Yet the camp itself was a kind of Disneyland. You enter through a gate decorated with metal soldiers made by the prisoners. There are enormous murals, famous Russian paintings depicting glorious moments from the Middle Ages or even earlier. A huge steam train sits above the entrance gate; there is a wooden windmill, Don Quixote and an Egyptian-style pyramid. There is everything, with genuinely surprising decorations, including little wooden guard huts like those at the entrance to a cheap amusement park. Everything was colourful, all the walls and interiors, mainly light blue and light green. Psychologically chosen colours, I suppose, to calm the prisoners. The uniforms, meanwhile, were black with red lettering.
