Ice Fishers

Aleksey Kondratyev (1993)

Improvised shelter forms in Kazakh winter fishing, photographed as intimate evidence of adaptation, nomadic vestiges, and global influence in Astana.

Description

Ice Fishers, developed by Aleksey Kondratyev from an initial 2014 encounter through dedicated winter fieldwork in 2015–16, portrays men fishing through the frozen Ishim River in Astana, Kazakhstan. Kondratyev encountered them while working on Formations, his broader study of post-Soviet transformation in Central Asia, and later developed the subject into a separate, more intimate series. The project situates the practice within Astana’s rapid redevelopment as a capital shaped by oil-led growth. The Ishim separates the older settlement from the newer high-rise city, positioning the fishers between competing urban histories. Their windbreaks, assembled from salvaged plastic, rice bags, and imported packaging, connect adaptation to severe cold with questions of nomadic continuity, modernization, and global capitalism’s effects on daily life.

Across the color photographs, isolated men and shelter-like forms occupy broad, high-key fields of snow. Bright plastic layers, taped seams, and irregular silhouettes stand apart from the suppressed city, while bodies and faces often remain obscured. This distance shifts attention from conventional portraiture toward surface, shape, and the mediated act of looking. Practical barriers consequently read as inadvertent sculptures, and sparse compositions create a mood of stillness and separation.

Kondratyev initially used a medium-format digital camera, then switched to a smaller digital camera after extreme cold repeatedly caused his equipment to shut down. He approached each shelter, explained his focus on its structure, and sought consent before photographing. Snow became a compositional device, while digital editing removed buildings and power lines to intensify isolation. Influenced by Eva Hesse and Robert Morris, he tested material-led sculptural thinking within documentary photography.

Following media circulation beginning with CNN in 2016 and National Geographic and Vogue Italia in 2017, Ice Fishers had its first solo exhibition at Blue Sky in Portland in May 2017. That year it became a Leica Oskar Barnack Award finalist, appeared in the finalists' Berlin exhibition, and received Burn's Fujifilm/Young Talent Award. The Magenta Foundation also named Kondratyev a Flash Forward "Bright Spark." Loose Joints published the 60-page, 40-color-plate photobook in September 2018, when Leica Fotografie International selected it as "Book of the Month." Later solo presentations included SFO Museum in 2021-22, Full Circle Photography Gallery in Baltimore in 2021, and Yeast Photo Festival in 2022.

Behind the work

Kondratyev initially treated the pictures as an incidental oddity, but reconsidered them during a research residency in Italy and later returned to Astana for a month focused on the fishers.

To photograph the shelters, Kondratyev walked up to each plastic enclosure, knocked on it, and asked permission from the person inside. Some fishers initially waved him away or assumed he wanted a conventional portrait; many agreed once he explained that the shelters themselves were his subject.

The fishers patched holes in their plastic shelters with tape to keep air inside. Kondratyev noted that their breath collected within the bags and helped keep them warm; local reporting described temperatures often falling below –34°C.

The 2018 book was designed to make its physical form echo the shelters: it combines a plastic-like leather cover, thin glossy and rough textured papers, visible stitching, and ends with a thick red stitched line on the final page recalling the thread used to sew the fishers’ plastic housing.

Quotes by the photographer

"I was interested in examining the aesthetic forms of these improvised protective coverings and the way in which they functioned as inadvertent sculptures."

"With my Ice Fishers series, I wanted to show the vestiges of a nomadic way of life despite the country’s embracement of modernity."

"I was interested in how the bags and their materials functioned as a signifier of the broader effects of globalism on individual people."

"I was interested in the idea of isolating oneself off from the world, like these guys do with their plastic bags… I thought by taking out the background, that would be another way to further that idea."

"It’s interesting because the plastic abstracts the subject inside. If the guys didn’t have the bags over them—if you could see their eyes and feel their gaze on you—then I feel it would be really uncomfortable to look at them in the same way."

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