It is hard to even imagine what it is like to live in one of the most inhospitable territories on earth, covered in snow all year round, with temperatures dropping below minus 50 degrees in the coldest months. It is in these conditions that the Nenets live, in the Siberian strip of land called the Yamal peninsula, inhabited by herds of animals that cause entire villages to migrate.
The Nenets are a nomadic people devoted to their livestock, the only source of wealth and survival for entire families. Their connection with nature is spiritual and shamans play an important role in the villages, connecting humans with the darkest and most mysterious forces.

Nicola Ducati’s Shades of White series is an account of living with the Nenets for ten days, immersing oneself in their culture and trying to decipher the gestures and minimalist language that describes nature according to the feelings it arouses. There are ten different words just to describe white in all its nuances, and it is easy to think that this is normal, since white in the Yamal surrounds the entire visual horizon, with infinite meanings and textures.
In the tents, animal skins warm from the cold, while Samoyed dogs in a corner gnaw on the last bones of a fish.

One of the few signs of mechanical human intervention is the slow, silent railway that brings supplies and relief, seen by the Nenets as a means through which to exchange products. The transit of the train leaves no trace in the snow, the rails disappear and only the cloud of steam remains in the landscape.
The photographs show a minority that is preserving a primordial way of life, adapting their lifestyle, sending the youngest to university to increase their chances of surviving an unsustainable economic system that is defying even the coldest Arctic storms.

Every day, on our Instagram profile, we ask you to share with us your most beautiful pictures and photographs.
For this InstHunt collection of this week we have selected your 10 best proposals: @photostrekoza, @obsessive.ph0t0graphy, @paola_francesca_barone, @asya.zang, @niinque, @saracamporesi.it, @fabrizio_lecca, @kevin.ponzuoli, @ele.naus, @clickquieli.

Tag @collateral.photo to be selected and published on the next InstHunt.

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Un post condiviso da Evgeniya Otyakova (@photostrekoza)

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Un post condiviso da ℳartial (he/his) (@obsessive.ph0t0graphy)

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Un post condiviso da Paola Francesca Barone (@paola_francesca_barone)

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Un post condiviso da Bianca Tardini 🇮🇹 (@niinque)

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Un post condiviso da Sara ‖ Fotografia Arte Cultura (@saracamporesi.it)

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Un post condiviso da Sarah Benzoni | Fotografie (@clickquieli)

There seems to be an almost infinite depth in the space photographed by Karim Amr, the pyramids on the horizon are as large as they seem to be built on the same vertical plane. The weight of the air creates layers and defines volumes, towering over anything but rock, sand or sky.
Amr’s photographic series on Egypt alternates between clear landscapes with the moon clearly defined in the sky and views in which the sand, lifted by the hot wind, describes the instability of the night in the desert. Ancient architecture such as the Pyramids and the Sphinx look like spatial ramparts defending an alien landscape, like the settings of Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune.

Karim Amr’s is an attempt to abstract as much as possible a complex territory such as the desert. The speed with which the landscape changes is contrasted with the idea of stillness, stability and geometry, a play of layers that fossilises even the intrusion of man.
It is fascinating to note how much the sunlight in a landscape such as the Egyptian desert transforms from a chromatic point of view, becoming either an enveloping white veil or a warm red that seems to set fire to the ground and the air.
The photographer’s research also involved the Arab architecture of his city, a series which can be seen in part on Amr’s official Instagram profile.

“Adriatic”, the photographic work of Riccardo Fregoso, is a story that stops time and invites us to reflect on the value of memory. The coasts of Abruzzo and Molise are captured in light. Light is the protagonist of these photographs and it is always light that creates forms and gives them colour. It is certainly not a Caravaggesque light, but a modern one, inspired by early 20th-century painting and the style of great photographers.

We could call it metaphysical, able to freeze time and catapult us into a temporary suspension of reality. It is like his photos, so limpid and diaphanous, sincerely show an eternal hour that has always existed but is, in some ways, ancient. It is the hour of a precise instant, where everything stops and dreams chase each other, where we imagine fixed and unchanging places that have existed and that now seem to return from an undefined past. 

Riccardo Fregoso’s references to photographers such as Luigi Ghirri or Joel Meyerowitz cannot be overlooked, like certain traces of Hopper’s light, to define his aesthetic. The Adriatic Sea turns out to be a sort of Italian Cape Cod, not only a place of holiday, but of memory. 

These photographs, so precisely composed and balanced, show a calibrated portion of space, leaving our imagination to fill them with everyday life, Fellini characters and an all-Italian horizon of scents, aromas, sounds and perceptions. After all, the memory of each individual cannot be separated from a collective memory, which draws its origins from a shared history of images, films, songs and books. And the holiday resort is one of the artistic spaces in which writers, filmmakers and singers moved most after the Second World War. 

That is why, even if we have never been in Abruzzo or Molise, we feel that the photographs in this work are somehow ours, we see them as part of our personal history because they belong to another story, another tale, which is common to most us.

Autore: Francesco Fusi