June 2003
Carl de Keyzer
ZONA Siberian Prison Camps
Carl De Keyzer took the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way east. For several
months throughout 2000-2002, in the summer and in the winter, he worked
as a photographer in camps located in the former Gulags, each holding
between 1,500 and 2,500 prisoners.
A reader of Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, de Keyzer expected hell. Instead
the first camp he visited, a model camp, was a cheap Disneyland painted
in bright colors with wooden and metal ornaments, murals depicting glorious
moments of USSR history and sleek black uniforms that made the inmates
look like they might live in New York City’s East Village. Another
kind of camp was cowboy-like, surrounded by forests, where prisoners worked
as log-cutters. Yet another type was a complete village where inmates
farmed and their families were allowed to live with them.
De Keyzer then decided that, photography being an art of appearances,
he would photograph what he saw and only what he saw. That is to say what
the Russians allowed him to see. He states that “there wasn’t
even a possibility to get the real situation… so I decided to play
the game, since the original idea - which was the only reason we had permission
to photograph in the first place - was to take a positive approach to
the new situation in the camps.”
De Keyzer never saw any punishment or discipline: “I guess the punishments
are pretty bad when something happens, but I never saw that.” Or:
“I got a sense of freedom in the camps.” However, he later writes
in the same text that prisoners are not allowed to send or receive letters
or pictures: the only way they are ever going to communicate with their
families is through de Keyzer’s book.
Having seen only what the authorities wanted him to see, de Keyzer, who
never tried to interview the inmates about their life conditions, proceeds
to describe the camps as summer camps for adults. For his benefit, the
inmates are constantly playing football, volleyball, basketball, ping-pong,
and tennis (though it took the authorities half an hour to find racquets
and they never did find balls). Their life is apparently a perpetual vacation:
they go to the sauna, watch TV and dance in discos. The food, de Keyzer
admits, is not too great but “the bread is high quality, though the
soup isn’t and there is no meat.” No matter, since he can always
buy rice or chocolate with his dollars. They help with that little problem
that the inmates have of having to relieve themselves outdoors in subzero
temperatures.
All along de Keyzer is having great fun – the best summer in his
life, he says – and trying to persuade himself, and his readers,
that he was right to do what he did. When the local TV came to interview
him and the general together, “I said that if I had a choice between
staying in an American prison and the Siberian labor camp I’d choose
the Siberian labor camp.” After a while, de Keyzer “forgot about
asking them to open this or that door, so I could discover something horrible.
I abandoned the idea to reveal as much as possible.”
Even though he tries to redeem his images with a sense of irony –
Calvin Klein-clad inmates playing tennis with no ball – what de Keyzer
created is beautifully shot and composed color propaganda photography.
We could even enjoy them for a while. But he need not have bothered to
go to Siberia: he could just work for Benetton right here in New York
City - and becoming Benetton ads is certainly what will happen to his
pictures.
It goes to show that the line between irony and cynicism being very fine
indeed a Magnum photographer has put his considerable talent into the
service of self-promoting, “post-modern” cynicism. It would
be understandable if he was in his twenties, but he is not, and quoting
Dostoevsky’s “House of the Dead” in the beginning only
adds to our malaise. After all, Dostoevsky possessed what is not in this
book: a deep empathy for the prisoners, as he was one himself and suffered
in his own bones the chill of the Siberian winters, the physical punishments,
the hunger and the exile.
The very beauty of de Keyzer’s images is wrenching. Their truth lies
in what he did not want to see: the contrast between the Disneyland environment
and the story written in the inmates’ faces. They cannot hide their
confusion, anxiety, sadness, anger, and bewilderment at having to play
happy for the camera’s sake.
Hell could be painted in beautiful colors, and often is – in everyday
life and in prison camps. It is, nevertheless, hell, and de Keyzer chose
neither to go beyond the surface nor to do his job as a photographer and
as a human being. No one said that job was easy.
-- Carole Naggar
Carl de Keyzer
ZONA
Siberian Prison Camps
Trolley Publications
Trolley Ltd, London, 2003. Distributed by Phaidon Press
