Gulag

Barry Lewis (1948)

Soviet forced labor camps and conditions faced by incarcerated prisoners in the early 1990s, contextualized within a broader examination of historical memory and political repression.

Description

Barry Lewis's Gulag documents the chilling legacy of the Soviet Union's forced labor camps through a photographic exploration undertaken in Eastern Siberia during the winter of 1991. Set against the backdrop of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms, which enabled transparency, the project granted Lewis access to suppressed histories and the voices of Gulag survivors.

The journey began in Magadan, a desolate port city built by Gulag prisoners and historically used as a transit hub for inmates shipped from across the Soviet Union. Described by Lewis as a “cold Bleak City with no trees,” Magadan embodied both the physical and historical barrenness of Stalinist penal logistics.

His approach centers on individual stories and historical memory, encouraging viewers to consider the ongoing consequences of systemic repression. Each photograph is both a testament and an accusation, aimed at preserving personal and collective memory against official narratives of silence and denial. The series includes not only images of survivors but also of prisoners still incarcerated at the time, providing rare documentation of ongoing penal life within the collapsing Soviet system.

Using Kodachrome film, the photographs depict institutional and geographic environments in vivid color, contrasting with the restrained subject matter documented throughout the project. Lewis composes his images to either frame individuals amid harsh architecture or to leave landscapes purposefully uninhabited—such as the Kolyma Highway, a 2,000-kilometer route built by prisoners, where countless died and were buried beneath the road itself.

First shown widely in European magazines in 1991, the work re-emerged as the photobook Gulag (2024) and has since been exhibited at Photo North Festival, Leeds and FOTOIST International Photography Festival, Kosovo. Recognition includes finalist for the Lucie Photo Book Prize.

Behind the work

"We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months — after that we don’t need him anymore." Placed at the very beginning of the book, this quote sets the tone for Barry Lewis’s stark visual chronicle of Soviet repression.

Barry Lewis and his team — including a writer and translator — paid a £700 bribe to the KGB to gain access to photograph inside functioning prisons like Camp AV261/4 in Uptar. The final and most difficult destination was the abandoned Butugychag labour camp, a secret uranium mine active until 1955. This location was particularly hazardous due to dangerous levels of radioactivity, and locals warned against eating berries or drinking river water in the area.

During the Gulag expedition, Barry Lewis was accompanied by writer Peter-Matthias Gaede—working for the commissioning outlet Geo—and translator Vladimir Pyljov, whose language skills opened access to the people and places central to the project.

Founded in 1989, Memorial emerged as Russia’s foremost organization for documenting victims of political repression. During Barry Lewis’s Gulag project in 1991, Memorial helped him locate survivors like Asir Sandler and provided access to early victim registries sourced from Books of Remembrance. Decades later, Memorial was branded a "foreign agent" and forcibly shut down by Russia’s Supreme Court in 2021.

Quotes by the photographer

"Travelling to the Siberian Gulag in 1991 would have been impossible without Gorbachev’s glasnost. The speed and chaos of the reforms created a brief moment when people were both able and willing to speak—a window that closed soon after the Soviet Union fell. I had a lucky break during this short window of openness."

"The Gulag survivors had a quiet dignity, their pain and loss, metamorphosed into a fragile radiance, the anger transformed into a tired kindness, but always needing to tell their story. These old people all had stories of a history that the Russian government wanted to forget and, despite perestroika, were hoping would disappear with their deaths."

"I particularly wanted to do this journey in mid-winter to echo the pain of the prisoner's march north along the Road of Bones."

"Asir Sandler, an 80-year-old doctor I met in Magadan, had spent eleven years in a prison camp for carrying a book of ironic poems—some joking about Stalin. He’d initially received the death penalty, later commuted. When I told him I was visiting the old Magadan prison, he said, ‘That’s where I was taken when arrested.’ I asked if he wanted to join me. By a strange coincidence, his cell was full of old arrest documents—and we found his arrest sheet. I took this photo of him at the entrance to his old cell... it was a very emotional moment."

"I was given permission to wander freely (with an armed guard!) amongst the inmates who showed curiosity more than hostility."

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