Shipping early November 2024.
I am very excited to announce my first photo book - Some Worlds Have Two Suns - will be published this October by GOST books.
Creating this book has been a pretty special journey for me. From its beginnings in 2015 to the years working in Kazakhstan to what it has become today is something I could never have envisioned. I care so much about you seeing this book because I believe it’s the most important work I’ve ever done.
Every three months a space rocket carrying three astronauts and cosmonauts to the International Space Station launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. At around the same time, to the north-east in remote grasslands, three other astronauts fall back to earth. The photographs in Some Worlds Have Two Suns document these comings and goings of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft and the local community whose lives are accidentally intertwined with this portal to space.
I became interested in the Soyuz landing after seeing the event in a 2014 documentary. It was deep winter and the spacecraft descended under parachute into an ice world. A ground team battled the harsh conditions to open the capsule and when eventually three humans emerged my heart skipped a beat…I had just returned from covering a war and had witnessed the very worst of humanity, yet here were humans working together and achieving the seemingly impossible. In my jaded state it was profoundly moving and I resolved to go and see it for myself.
During my first visit in 2015, as the astronauts and cosmonauts were taking part in the landing ceremony, I saw a group of locals from the village of Kenjebai-Samai who had come to witness the strange event taking place in their own back yard. Although initially drawn to the astronauts, it was the local community residing in the isolated grasslands who compelled me to keep returning.
On each visit I would stay in Kenjebai-Samai or explore further afield. The steppe, which at first appeared as a boundless void, would over time reveal unexpected details. I found a people largely uninterested in the space travellers and yet somehow bound up in this strange ritual. These descendants of nomads were once again on the edge of a new horizon.
Published October 2024
292 x 355 mm
104pp, 49 colour images
Hardback
ISBN 978-1-915423-62-7
