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Emile Ducke

Photographer

Emile Ducke

Kolyma: Along the Road of Bones

The prisoners brought the road, and then the road brought more prisoners. Thousands of inmates of Stalin's gulag labor camps died building a highway across the icy, far-flung Russian region of Kolyma. The route became known as the 'Road of Bones'. It would bring over a million prisoners to work in the area’s gold, tin and uranium mines. For many, the journey across this vast landscape of harsh beauty, where winter temperatures average minus 38° Celsius, would be their last. After the camps were closed following Stalin's death, the route was used mainly by workers drawn to Kolyma by the promise of high wages. But today, fewer and fewer people come to work in this desolate region. Their settlements, scattered along the length of the 'Road of Bones', fade, and along with them fades the memory of the prisoners of the past. The scale and severity of the suffering of the camps, located in one of the most inhospitable environments known to mankind, becomes increasingly difficult to fathom.

Emile Ducke

Emile Ducke is a German documentary photographer based in Moscow, Russia. A regular contributor to The New York Times, he has documented the effects of melting permafrost above the Arctic circle, probed the legacy of Stalin’s forced labour camps in the Russian Far East, and captured scenes of traditional life in Chechnya. In longer-term projects, he has focused on the challenges faced by communities in some of Russia’s most remote areas, with photo-essays published by the ­Washington Post, National Geographic and Der Spiegel, among others. He has been selected a World Press Photo 6x6 visual storyteller, named one of PDN’s 30 emerging photographers to watch, and awarded the n-ost prize for reporting on Eastern Europe.