Being close to far away

In 1948 my great-grandfather was imprisoned in a Russian forced labor camp known as the Gulag, an acronym for the title Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies Surviving this life event pushed my great-grandfather beyond the limits of civil society, rationality, and empathy into a world that author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called, an unassimilable spiritual earthquake which not every person can cope with. Like millions of others, my great grandfather took a journey into the Gulag country, a place beyond vision or understanding. In the fall of 2012, I too traveled to the Gulag country, in order to trace the footsteps of my great-grandfather. Being Close to Far Away explores a post-traumatic environment in Vorkuta, Russia, a former location of the Gulag, and the camp where my great-grandfather was imprisoned. The Gulag was shrouded in secrecy by the Soviet Government until the death of Stalin, and my great-grandfather disappeared behind this shroud for seven years (1948-1955). This thesis project is in part to reclaim those years; for him, for myself, and for my family. I photographed the prison sites extensively. I did so in order to explore the traces and scars of the Gulag