The Arctic Story Hunter | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

Conjure an image of the Russian tundra, Siberia, as far north as you can go before you hit the Arctic Ocean. Your image probably looks like a snowy whiteout. You might picture stark, forbidding ice scapes devoid of color and life. But through the lens of National Geographic explorer and photographer Evgeny Arbogyeva, it's a wonderland wrestling with people and their stories.

Like, for example, the keepers of the remote weather stations that line Russia's Arctic coast. When I was a kid, my dad would bring me to visit meteorological stations, and I wanted to be in all of them. I just wanted to see how it is to live there. So as an adult, she hopped on an icebreaker that brought supplies to those isolated outposts. I saw this station that was, you know, from the '30s that hadn't been renovated since then, and was all surrounded by sand. Then, there is this man who comes out with his bright blue eyes—total loner, unable to kind of make connections with people because he's just too overwhelmed by all of us.

The man's name was Slava. He was in his 60s, and he lived alone at the weather station, an hour's helicopter ride from the nearest settlement. Right away, Evgenia was drawn to him. He was kind of trying to hide almost from everyone, but I could tell that he is a real thing—he is of the Arctic, of the nature. So how did you—I mean, if he's afraid of people, or you know, not good at making connections—how did you convince him to let you come and spend time with him?

Well, as they're unloading all the supplies and all these people from meteorological organizations, they're like, "Okay, Slava, you know, give us the charts, blah blah blah, all these things," and he's overwhelmed by all these questions. I'm there, and I'm like, "Oh, what's this?" and "What's this?" In the distance, he's like, "Let's go, I'll show you." So he took me. I think he was happy to get away from all these people.

Evgenia followed Slava for a photo series called "Weatherman." She captured the storm-battered wooden cottage where he lives, his lonely march to log data in sub-freezing weather, and the antique-looking radio that's one of his few links to the outside world. "I learned so much from him. What I saw in him is this total honesty about who he is, and acceptance of who he is, and also understanding the value of the land in the sense that he found the spot that makes him happy, and he is this land. He managed to get into the point where he is this sea and he is this peninsula as much as he is Slava."

"I'm Peter Gwyn, editor-at-large at National Geographic, and this is Overheard—a show where we eavesdrop on the wild conversations we have here at Nat Geo and follow them to the edges of our big, weird, beautiful world. This week, why it's impossible for Evgenia Arbogyeva to look away from the Arctic. She tells us about hunters looking for the tusks of ancient mammoths melting from the permafrost and about nomadic reindeer herders following the rhythms of their ancestors, and why this unique environment leaves humans both odd and afraid. More after the break."

Evgenia's story starts on the edge of Siberia in a town called Tixie. It's a small town on the shore of Laptev Sea in the Russian Arctic, in the Republic of Yakutia. When I was growing up there, it was about 12,000 people living there, so it was pretty big. It was a famous and important seaport on the Northern Sea route, and during Soviet times, there were all these people coming—working there: military people, scientists, seamen. It was quite a vibrant community.

And then, I grew up there. My parents were teachers in the high school. After the fall of the Soviet Union, everybody just kind of, it was this massive wave of migration. We moved to the city called Yakutsk, which is the capital of Yakutia and officially the coldest city inhabited by people.

The coldest city inhabited by people? Yes, I just talked to my dad just now, this morning. He said it's minus 55. Oh my gosh, wow—Celsius. But Tixie, was it as cold as that? Yeah, it's not as cold as Yakutsk; it's a harsher climate because of the winds. The winds are really strong, and blizzards sometimes last for a few days. You literally cannot even go out from your house.

As a kid, it was great because you don't go to school— even snow days in the Arctic! Yeah, the blizzard days we call it, because you're—you just, you know, especially if you're a small kid, you come out of the house and you literally will be just flying in the tundra because the winds are so strong.

So tell me how you came to photography then, from Tixie to Yakutsk. You know, I know from working with photographers, the cold was not the friend of the camera, so how did—when did that start? When I was 15, I was an exchange student in Connecticut in the U.S., and I took a photography class. I was just blown away right away. You know, I spent a lot of time in the darkroom. And then, when I came back to Yakutsk, I thought, "Okay, I have to continue." So I started working in the local newspapers and developing my film because there's not many places to develop.

I was developing my film in the darkroom in the morgue. More? Because where you keep the dead bodies? Yeah, wait a minute, so you're developing your pictures in like a— in the morgue of like the city morgue of the hospital? Yes. Yeah, because there was, you know, there were not no places to develop film. There was this guy who was taking pictures of dead people and corpses in the hospital, and he had this darkroom. So I was going there and was developing my film.

Was that weird? I mean, was it creepy? I mean, as a kid, I was very much focused on developing my film. Right, right. So how did you take it to the next level? What comes next? Then I went to study in Moscow, in this Moscow International University. I was studying management, art management. Then I went to travel with reindeer herders, and I was living with the reindeer herders.

So how do you make that connection? You went from art management to reindeer herding. That was like a big leap there in Yakutia. I mean, we're so close to indigenous cultures. Most of them are nomads and reindeer herders. So I was aware of them, and I was photographing them at the celebrations that are happening in Yakutia. Also, a family of reindeer herders are good family friends of ours. So when I came back after university in Moscow, I just joined our friends and started migrating with them.

What does that look like? What do you mean, the migration? It's, well, reindeer herders, they have a herd of about 2,000 reindeer. Some of them live in the toms, some of them live in the tents, and they follow the herd. So they migrate, depending on the season, every week or less, depending on if it's winter or summer.

Let's kind of skip ahead a little bit to going back to Tixie. How did that come about? So, after living with reindeer herders, at some point, I did start photographing because it was just so amazing, some things that I saw there. At that point, I'm thinking, "Okay, this is what I want to do, and I want to be a photographer." I go to New York to study photography in the International Center of Photography, a one-year program.

And then I stay in New York for a little bit, and I'm being completely overwhelmed by everything that is happening in New York. There's amazing art, amazing artists around— the speed of the city, I love it, and I hate it at the same time. Like all New Yorkers, all people who live in New York. Then I think, "Okay, I have to go back to Tixie." I remember that longing that I had all those years and I thought to go and explore it as a photographer.

This is how many years later? You're 19 years later. Okay, is this the first time you've been back? Yeah, it's the first time I'm back since we left. What did that feel like? It felt so strange. Yeah, I had very strong emotions, especially because, now, as I mentioned before, when I lived there, there were 12,000 people living in town, and now it's only 4,000. The majority of buildings in town are abandoned, so it looks very scary. I was just really, really sad. I thought that I'm not gonna take any pictures because it's just too sad to photograph.

That's so ironic because the pictures that I've seen that you took of Tixie are not sad. Well, my first trip after wandering these empty streets, I went to the shore of the sea, and I was sitting there just kind of looking at the horizon, and I saw a family by the bonfire. There was this girl who was just throwing stones in the water, and they were very quiet. I could feel that they were in the same emotional wavelength somehow, and we started talking. The more we started talking, the more I thought, this girl, she's still here. She still has her reality here in Tixie.

How does she see the town? In the next trips I came back, I was already, you know, following Tanya—this girl. She opened her vision of the town to me, which was so similar to how I remembered it. I thought, "Wow, so it doesn't really matter." You know, if you love a place and if you're a kid, you don't see that all these ruins start to be a playground. It becomes a haunted house full of stories to explore rather than a relic or a reminder of a fallen empire.

What was it like to go to these places with her? You're seeing it through her eyes, but you're also seeing it in your memory. My childhood in Tixie ended so abruptly, so it wasn't like, you know, I was growing out of it. It was just like I had this beautiful world, and then I was taken away from it, and there was no closure. I was just so happy to be with Tanya and to become a kid again in this place, and have enough time to play again in the tundra and to run again, trying to touch the aurora or things like this.

Trying to touch a ruler? Yeah, is that a game that kids play in the Arctic? Oh yeah, I want to play their games, or like making wishes. You know, or like digging a hole in the tundra and putting your wishes, writing your wishes, and putting your wishes in there, hoping that they will all come true, and things like that. Because it was just me and her and her friends, and no adults around, I just was so free to be a kid again as well.

What does the aurora borealis look like in Tixie? It's a part of daily life. I mean, when I was a kid and when Tanya was in Tixie, you just see the aurora on your way to school, because in winter it's polar night, so you don't see the sun at all for a few months. You go to school, and then you just watch the aurora.

What is it—what does it look like? It can be different. It can be just green, or just white, or just yellow, or it can be all kinds of colors: purple, yellow, green—it depends. It can be very different. It can be a little bit; it can completely explode in the sky.

And it's moving? It's like shimmering and moving across you? Yeah, it's moving. It's like this—it's alive.

Why is it important to you to focus on the Arctic right now? I mean, I know you come from the Arctic, and you obviously have a deep love for it. But what are you thinking about right now, about the situation that the Arctic faces? Oh, there's so many things going on around the world, but in the Arctic especially, I mean, I cannot take pictures there now, you know. There's just so many changes and so many things that I know they need to be photographed now.

Like we used to look at it with awe; right now, we're looking at it and we're scared. Are you scared? I'm both in awe and scared.

So one story that you worked— I think it may have been your first story for National Geographic—was looking at the mammoth tusks, and I think in a way that story speaks to the changes in the Arctic. That was such an interesting sort of way to look at how the climate is changing.

Yeah, that was a very interesting assignment, and my first one. The story takes place in this uninhabited islands in the Laptev Sea. Because of the erosion and permafrost, there are these mammoth tusks that are emerging from the land.

So these are woolly mammoths that were living in this region, and then, like—they're frozen there? How are the mammoths there? I guess is my question. Well, the mammoths used to live there, and then their carcasses and bones are preserved so well because of permafrost. Because now permafrost is thawing, all these remains of mammoths come out. What happens now is it becomes— they call it like this "tusk rush," so there are all these people—like a gold rush.

Like a gold rush, but tusk rush? Yeah, because after the ban of international trade of elephant ivory, the Chinese market needed to have a replacement for the material. So mammoth, now with the emergence of all these mammoth tusks in Siberia, this is now a material that carvers are working with, and it's not illegal to use mammoth tusks. It's not?

Yeah, but it's a gray kind of area still. And you know, sometimes when we were digging out the skull of a mammoth, I was just standing there thinking, “Wow, this is so scary.” What's going to happen?

Because when I was on the Bolshoi Yakovsky, I had a GPS, and we had an older map. That was 2013, and I had a map of 2008 on my GPS, and I was standing on the edge of the island. The map of 2008 was showing that I'm very much inland, and that's when I was just struck by the difference of the border of the edge of the island because it had—because of the permafrost thaw.

Yeah, yeah. And some of the islands, scientists predicted in my lifetime, won't be there anymore. The island will be gone? Yeah.

So what’s next? What do you want to do next? I keep working. I just finished three new stories. In a way, "Weatherman" was the first chapter of the stories, and now I produced three more chapters, and I’ll just keep creating my necklace with different beads, and each story is a bead.

Yeah, I keep working in the Arctic. Is there any particular image that you just can't get out of your head, that it would be your dream to photograph? Well, right now, I really want to be able to find a way to photograph tundra in a way that people could really see it because, you know, tundra is, just, you know, in some areas they call it an Arctic desert, right?

So it's just a very empty space, but it's not. And it’s a world of its own, and so I'm struggling—I’m trying to figure out now how do I capture that tundra space. It was a backdrop almost, visually always, for a story unfolding, and now I really want to focus on these natural spaces that are protagonists of their own.

Wow, well Evgenia Arbogyeva, thank you very much. Thank you so much.

[Music] To see more of Evgenia's work, her photos from Tixie, and her National Geographic stories about mammoth ivory hunters and chasing rare butterflies in Malaysia, check out the links in our show notes. You can also find her photographs on our Instagram feed at Nat Geo.

Evgenia is working on a new documentary set in a region of Siberia that features some of the world's biggest gatherings of walruses. You can find links for all of that in the show notes; they're right there in your podcast app.

If you like what you hear and you want to support more content like this, please rate and review us on your podcast app and consider a National Geographic subscription. That's the best way to support Overheard and hear more great stories. Go to natgeo.com forward slash explore to subscribe.

Overheard at National Geographic is produced by Brian Gutierrez, Jacob Pinter, Marcy Thompson, and Alana Strauss. Our senior editor is Eli Chen. Robert Moleski edited this episode. Our senior producer is Carl Wills. Our executive producer of audio is Davar Ardalan, who produced this episode. Our fact-checkers are Robin Palmer and Julie Beer. Michelle Harris fact-checked this episode. Our copy editor is Amy Kulzak. Hansdale Suess sound designed this episode and composed our theme music.

This podcast is a production of National Geographic Partners. The National Geographic Society is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world and funds the work of National Geographic explorer Evgenia Arbogyeva. Whitney Johnson is the director of visuals and immersive experiences, and I'm your host, Peter Gwynne. Thanks for listening, and see y'all next time.

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