View from an apartment
Iturup, Kurils islands, Russia
2022
 
Giclée print on Hahnemühle FineArt Pearl paper.
Size 30x19 cm without white border.
 
The view from an apartment inhabited by a retired Russian soldier, his wife and two children, and their kitten. Iturup island, Kurils islands, the Far East of Russia.
 
This photo is from the book 'Calamity Islands | Sakhalin and the Kurils – terra incognita of a brutal Russian Empire' from 2022.
 
The Dutch had already been active in Asia since 1596. They were driven by rumours of gold and silver on two unknown islands — stories first reported by the crew of a Portuguese ship that had been cast ashore in the 1580s. Fuelled by these rumours, a kind of gold rush began after 1611. Through Dutch espionage, the story eventually reached the Netherlands.
 
Marten Gerritsz Fries, the Dutch navigator who first charted the southern part of Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands for Europe, is fairly well known around the Pacific, but remains almost unknown in the Netherlands. There are no statues of him, and few stories about him in history books. In that respect, his life story fits seamlessly into the forgotten history of Sakhalin and the Kurils.
 
Oleg Klimov is a Russian photographer who worked for Dutch, European, and American newspapers for a long time.
 
Oleg Klimov was born in 1964 in the Tomsk district. He went on to study astronomy in Kazan, but abandoned his studies there to become a photojournalist. Starting with the earthquake in Armenia in 1988, Klimov documented major events in the former Soviet Union for Russian and foreign media. From 1991 to 2012, Klimov was the permanent photocorrespondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
 
Klimov has curated numerous exhibitions, such as the exhibition 'Legacy of an Empire' at Huis Marseille in Amsterdam in 2005. In the same year, a photo album of the same name containing essays was published by Edition Braun (Germany) and publisher Mets&Schilt (Netherlands).
 
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