The display comprises photographs from the collection of ROSPHOTO which have been created during the recent fifteen years. The featured works represent a laconic story of the everyday life of Chukotka’s indigenous people – Luoravetlan.

The life and oeuvre of the photographer has been inextricably connected with that remote region in Russia’s Far North-East bathed by the waters of the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean and by the Bering Sea of the Pacific Ocean.

Konstantin Lemeshev was born in 1964 in Khabarovsk. Following his military service he came to Chukotka to the small town of Egvekinot where he got engrossed with photographing and was very much taken with the idea of “illustrating and preserving unique traits of Chukotka and its inhabitants.” The artist spent the next thirty years turning that idea into reality by means of photography. During that period Konstantin Lemeshev had worked his way up from an amateur photographer to a professional photojournalist. He made his first steps as an artist at the Egvekinot’s photo club “Beringia,” in the 1990s he worked for the local newspaper The Kresta Bay, in 2002 he became a photo reporter of the regional newspaper The Far North; Konstantin Lemeshev also collaborated with National Geographic. In 2005 the photographer published an original monograph “Chukotka: 20 years-long Report” featuring his best shots.

Although the subjects of Lemeshev’s works seem to be quite ordinary, each picture is based on a true story. In his photographs Lemeshev not only depicts typical everyday life scenes and covers traditional way of life of the locals, but does his best to render the beauty of northern nature and observe the effects caused by modern civilization to ingenious culture.

The main characters of Lemeshev’s work are the residents of Chukotka, the people whom the artist respects sincerely and deeply. In the above mentioned monograph the author notes:

“The people of Chukotka call themselves ‘Luoravetlan,’ which means ‘true persons.’ They have inhabited this harsh Northern land named Chukotka since the dawn of time. <…> Staying at a reindeer farm and observing the locals, feeling the rhythm and mood of their life you eventually come to understand that there is a unique aura here, the aura which is natural and is in harmony with the Land, the land of Luoravetlan.”