John Peter Askew, Sweets on Dashboard 2008

with an essay about John Peter Askew

“I remember most of what I hear - and I listen all day - but sometimes I do not know how to fit everything together. When this happens I cling to words or phrases that seem to ring true.”

John Berger, To the Wedding, 1995

An exhibition in Perm in 1996 led me to become dear friends with a family there and I found myself returning regularly to visit. For 12 years I gave little attention to the photographs I was making of my friends and their lives, except to compile handmade photo-books and playful collages and post them as mementoes back to the Chulakovs. Perhaps this accounts for the unselfconscious nature of many of the images. It was this aspect that initially drew my attention back to them in 2008 after returning from spending a memorable summer in Russia. That summer I had joined Giorgi’s wife Valya, Ann, their youngest daughter, and their son Deema, for a month long 6,000 kilometre round road trip to Altai in south western Siberia.

The picture above, Sweets on Dashboard 2008, is from that long car journey. We were accompanied by two other families, the Ketovs and the Bolshakovs, close friends of the Chulakovs who had over the years also welcomed me into their lives. The trip was an adventure not just for me: it was an exciting and ambitious undertaking for everybody. The purpose of the journey was to watch a solar eclipse and to undertake a week-long walking and camping expedition into the base of Mount Belukha, Siberia’s highest peak — a snowy pinnacle pointing to the sky, which has been for millennium a focus of Buddhist, Hindu and Shamanist spirituality. In Altai folklore, the mountain is believed to be the gateway to Shambhala (Shangri-la), a place of peace, tranquility and happiness; a “pure land” where all citizens are enlightened.

On the first day of the trek we encountered torrential rain and my camera became waterlogged after I had walked for hours with it stored neglectfully in an unfastened, external pocket of my waterproof jacket. Alexi Ketov had come equipped with two cameras and he generously lent me one. The next day I lost my footing whilst crossing a deep, fast flowing mountain stream and this camera became waterlogged too. More in desperation than hope I took my camera apart, leaving the components to dry on a flat rock by our camp. In the process I lost the small metal battery compartment cover and became further distraught. Undeterred, my friends fashioned another one from the metal of a tin can without any implements other than an axe and a multi-tooled pocket knife. Miraculously, once dry and reassembled the camera functioned again.

I was at a loss that I couldn’t photograph much of our expedition into one of the most remote, beautiful and unspoilt regions of the world but over time I have come to realize that the photographs that ring true for me are those that elevate the everyday, rather than those describing the dramatic, grandiose or spectacular. Returning that summer to London I realized I had accumulated an archive of over ten thousand images, and that this was a single body of work which stretched back fourteen years at that point, and now almost twenty-five years; amounting to nearly twenty thousand images. The archive encompasses four generations of the Chulakov family. In this it resembles those nineteenth-century novels that can map time in a way we cannot be aware of outside of art, by showing change and continuity, one generation after another, across relations and friendships.

As an outsider in Perm – that is as someone who can’t speak Russian sufficiently fluently to participate in every aspect of life – I can only ever create my own story, my own play of the Chulakovs’ lives. The Chulakovs are a family of three sisters and a brother, just as in Chekhov’s play Three Sisters. I discovered too, that Chekhov had written to Maxim Gorky, saying that when he set his play in an imaginary provincial town, he was thinking of a place exactly like Perm.

Lying at the heart of Chekhov’s play is the sense of difficulty that human beings have in living in the present. In the play, the three sisters all long to return to Moscow, where they imagine their ‘real’ lives to be, from the provincial town much like Perm where they are stationed; and yet what I immediately saw in the Chulakov family and their friends was the joy they took in being in the present moment.

John Peter Askew

The picture is part of the current Pushkin House exhibition, ‘We. Photographs from Russia 1996-2017’ by John Peter Askew.