Book Club: Siberia with Michael Turek

Michael Turek is a photographer based in New York City. His photography focuses on documentary projects and commericial assignments. He holds a degree from Rochester Institute of Technology and as a Kodak Ambassador, he also leads workshops with the Kodak Camera Club. His latest photo project, Siberia, has just been published by Damiani Books.

Hi Michael – thanks for talking to us at Contact Sheet today. I recently got a copy of Siberia and I love it. I understand you shot it while accompanying Sophy Roberts as she researched her book The Lost Pianos of Siberia. What's the relationship between the two books? Is yours a totally separate project or are they interlinked in some way?

Although both books are very different, they are related. They’re cousins, maybe even siblings. What you see in my book, for the most part, were places and people that Sophy also visited and interviewed. I always saw the projects as being parallel or congruent, but they do not explicitly reference once another, so you won’t find a coordinating note in Lost Pianos, “see such and such person on plate 17 in Michael’s book.”

OK great, so how did it all get started?

Sophy and I have known each other for nearly 10 years, and we often worked together on editorial assignments, her as a writer and me as photographer. However, we had began discussing the idea of working on something much bigger, and with less of the normal constrictions of magazine and newspaper stories. We wanted to focus on a place that was outside the typical tourist map.

But the original genesis is owed to Sophy, when she was in Mongolia during the summer of 2015, and the idea really took root. She heard an incredible pianist named Odgerel Sampilnorov playing in a felt-lined ger in the middle of the steppe. Odgerel is ethnically a Buryat, a people who historically lived in Russia, but after the first series of Soviet purges most of them were evicted south into Mongolia or sent to the gulags. During this performance, one Sophy’s companions in the ger leaned over and said something about finding, “one of those lost pianos of Siberia,” for Odgerel to play - something that would be more worthy of her talent, rather than the Yamaha she was playing. Such a whimsical comment stuck inside Sophy’s mind, and the idea began to form. By the next winter, in early 2016 I joined Sophy on her first trip to Siberia. We weren’t sure if we’d find enough material to warrant anything more than a single trip. As it turned out, I ended up making five trips to Siberia over the span of two years, spending over 100 days crisscrossing Siberia.

 That’s a huge commitment for a personal project on the other side of the world. Were you nervous about it?

To be honest, if I didn’t have the gentle nudging from Sophy and the support of my partner Rosanna, I probably wouldn't have done it. Sophy knew early on that she wanted to write a book, but even after that first trip, I didn’t yet have a clear vision of what my own work could become. For me, the big commitment came in May of 2016 when Rosanna and I went over to Sophy’s place in Dorset to sit down and talk about going back to Siberia that summer. I could see that costs were about to spiral upwards, and I was really hesitant, this was going to be completely self-funded. I was very ready to say no, it would cost too much, I was too unsure, but I remember very clearly Rosanna telling me from across the table, “you should do it, this is the work you want to do, you should go again.”

As photographers we so often work alone, especially on personal projects, and it's wonderful to have a partner in crime like that. So you push each other. 

Normally on my editorial assignments, the writer would go to the location first, write the story, file it to their editor, then it would be passed to me with a shot list from the photo editor, and a few weeks later I would follow the writer’s footsteps. This system worked well, it was efficient, but it was also prescriptive.

“If it’s just me and the subject and I suddenly leave them and get up and start inspecting their kitchen, it’s really odd. So being with Sophy during these moments physically created a lot of space that permitted me to just float around.”

Working with Sophy was completely different on this project. I often had less control but everything was about spontaneity. Particularly in regards to making portraits, the atmosphere was very different. It revealed how having two people allowed moments to happen that I would never be able to get if I was on my own. Normally, when it’s just the subject and myself, the subject can only focus on me, and that can be quite intense, and creatively I can get stuck in dead ends. On the other hand when Sophy is leading the proceedings and interviewing the subject, the person will become at ease, and there’s a rapport growing between everyone in the room, myself included, just by virtue of the fact that I'm there. With the subject’s focus on Sophy, I can get up, start walking around and photographing things and it's not strange. If it's just me and the subject and I suddenly leave them and get up and start inspecting their kitchen, it’s really odd. So being with Sophy during these moments physically created a lot of space that permitted me to just float around.

Also the fact that we were working with a translator slows down the conversation even more. There's this incredible little moment that happens after the subject responds and the contents of that response go through the interpreter. The subject is sitting there still for several seconds, gazing somewhere else, momentarily disengaged. And that's when they shift their weight, they become relaxed, they get themselves into a position which I never would have thought to direct. And the results can be a little unusual, because it's unlike a normal conversation where your body language is completely directed to the other person. It's this weird three-way thing: a writer conducting an interview with a subject in a foreign language with an interpreter, and then you have me floating around like some sort of weirdo in the back. Now that I’m accustomed to working together like this, it’s now almost the only way I want to shoot. 

It gives you that space to photograph what you want, and catch people at moments where they're not being self-conscious, not thinking about themselves?

“I’ve learned to just be much more patient and accepting of a huge loss of control. Because then you gain something, moments that you would never be able to direct or pre-visualise. It allows that spontaneity to happen and I just have to sit and watch and wait for it to happen.”

Yeah, that’s it. But it’s also a pretty big loss of control. Oftentimes, because there's an interview going on, and sometimes it's being recorded, I have to sort of give way to the flow of that conversation. So it can be hard for me if I really want to start moving things around. I have to really select my times and when I can interject. If the light comes through the window for a second, I just have to time that really well. So sometimes you're sitting there and it feels like you're your fishing or hunting for the picture and it can be really frustrating. But I've learned to just be much more patient and accepting of a huge loss of control. Because then you gain something, moments that you would never be able to direct or pre-visualise. It allows that spontaneity to happen and I just have to sit and watch and wait for it to happen.

That's super interesting to hear how it changes your process. So did you have a sense with each trip that you were building this body of work? To what extent were you researching and planning what you wanted to shoot versus reacting to events as they unfolded in front of you?

More of the latter of the beginning and more of the former at the end. And I can tell that just by the amount that I shot on each trip. I think the shortest one was two weeks and longest was 31 days. The first trip I shot a ton, I think around 1400 images across 21 days, which was about the same as I would shoot on a regular editorial assignment. I was shooting everything.

“By the last trip, I was barely making 10 photographs a day”

And then on every successive trip I shot less and less. And I think that was because I was becoming more and more focused on what I needed as time went on. I didn't need to repeat myself. And by the last trip, I was barely making 10 photographs a day.

By the end I felt much more focused, really intentional about what I needed to shoot and what I could skip. And personally, this sensation was incredible. By the end of the project, I don't want to say that I was ever like a local, but Siberia felt much more familiar. I was no longer overexcited and overshooting everything. When you feel this way, you make different photos, and it’s something that can only happen by spending time in a place. I wish I could apply this to my next short editorial, but I think maybe that’s impossible!

Yeah, I think that's something I've always struggled with as well. In a way you almost have to shoot the clichés to be able to see past them. You know, to get it out of your system and say, okay, I've done that, now I can move on and look for something more interesting. 

Right. You do and you have to check the box and you’ve got to come home with it, it's your job. But this box checking takes time, and it adds up, and takes up a lot of mental energy. So it was something really incredible for me to be in a place that once felt so foreign and then to feel it become familiar. And that was that was maybe the best part of the whole thing. 

I never thought I’d hear you say you enjoyed being bored in Siberia, but I get what you mean! So let’s talk tools for a moment. You shot this all on a Pentax 67?

Well yes, and no. Man, I had a huge crisis of equipment confidence all the way through this thing! I started on the Pentax 67 as it’s was always my main assignment camera. But around the time I started on Siberia I had been playing around with 35mm cameras much more, because I had been a little bored and tired with the Pentax. I mean the weight! And for a moment at the beginning I was like, this is just a personal project, I should take this opportunity to shoot on something wildly different and do it on 35mm.

But that never came to pass because the fact is, even though shooting on 35 is really fun, and it’s great to have so many shots in the camera, and when you click away it feels like you’re being productive – I’m always disappointed when I get 35mm film back. However, I did bring my Leica M3 for my blended exposures which I shot throughout, but they’re not in the book.

Yeah, whenever you get a great shot and kind of think “I wish I'd shot it on the Pentax”?

Right. But actually I gave up on the Pentaxes after two trips. I was sick and tired of the weight. So for the third trip I used a pair of Mamiya 7s and at first it was a revelation because they were so light and it was like oh, this is a joy. But they only lasted two trips – I still have them, but I could never get my decided which lenses I favored, none of the Mamiya focal lengths felt quite right.

So you've done the full circle?

Ha, yes I've done the full circle. The important thing is that at least the format and film was uniform. It was all Kodak Portra 400, so that at least remained the same throughout.

So tell me how the book came together? Did you always envision this was going to be a photo book from the outset? 

You know, the first trip was in winter, second trip was summer. And at that point I knew we had at least two more trips planned and I started thinking this could be a book. I started to show the work to a few photo editors who I knew well. And there were at least two people who said, okay, you've already got a book here.

“I was realising I could edit those 4000 images into three or four quite different books.”

I can't tell you how flattering that was, and sort of affirming because I really just didn't know. Two of the editors had mentioned Damiani, the publisher in Italy. There were a few other publishers that I really respected, here in the States and in Germany. But at that stage, I was really just looking for help editing, because I had I had close to 4000 images. And I was realising I could edit those 4000 images into three or four quite different books. Of course I had ingested a lot of Sophy’s research and ideas. But at the same time, I was not there to illustrate her book. 

I was referred to Yolanda Cuomo who is a book designer and editor here in New York and I submitted my work to her to see if she could help sort through the images. I had I had three or four sessions with her over the course of about four months. She and her team went through all the work, first digitally and then later we printed everything out and arranged it all over her studio, building a skeleton of the edit and sequence. She also suggested Damiani as a prime target for publishing, so we put together a PDF, like a treatment and sent it to Italy, and they agreed.

Rosanna is a graphic designer, so she did the layout, design and typography of the book. The whole concept of the cover is entirely hers. I had been at a loss as to what to do with the cover. And Yolanda suggested the dimensions. It's funny how much of an Italian project is turned into, between Damiani, Yolanda and Rosanna.

And you chose not to run captions in the book and just have the photographs. Is that something you thought hard about? 

Yeah, that was a big, big choice. And I know it’s annoyed a lot of people! The reason I didn’t use captions is because I wanted the book to feel imaginative, rather than dictative. When there’s a caption, it’s irresistible to read and they flavour it in a way that I wanted to avoid.

So now you've done this enormous project. The book is out there. How do you feel now? What's next?

I was very surprised by the feeling the moment that all the printing was finished. I had spent three days in Bologna overseeing the printing and on the final day when the last plate came, it was not euphoria that I felt. Instead I felt a shocking, unexpected feeling of a loss of control.

Because up until that point for the preceding four years, I always felt I had choice; throughout the period of making the photos, through the editing and design process. And I could always retract those choices. I could always change my mind. And I think like a lot of photographers, I'm highly indecisive. But ultimately I am very happy with how the book came out, and now with some distance of time between when I made those photos and now, I’m still impressed by the scope of it all.  

Amazing. Thank you Michael, that’s been super interesting. You can order Siberia online directly from Michael’s website here.