A Soviet Settlement Left in Suspension

The French photographer Damien Aubin has been working in Pyramiden, a former Soviet mining settlement on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, and the pictures are being gathered into a limited-edition book due in September 2026. Industrial operations stopped in 1998 and the site stayed largely empty until 2007, when new residents arrived. The Arctic cold has preserved buildings and their contents unusually well, from classrooms with open books to Lenin statues and a red and blue monument standing against the snow.

Aubin describes photographing in restrained, diffuse light with no event to describe and no narrative to unfold, and calls Pyramiden a place left in suspension rather than abandoned: spaces shaped by human intention but no longer aligned with it. That distinction keeps the work clear of ruin photography's usual appetite for decay. Here there is almost no decay to aestheticise, and what remains is stranger: everything in place, nobody present.