Image-building photography of the small people of the North for Gazprom Neft
PAO Gazprom Neft is the leader of the Russian oil and gas sector and the only company in the country that develops oilfields on the Arctic shelf.
PAO Gazprom Neft is one of Russian top three in the oil and gas production market. The company develops fields in the north of Russia in the Yamal-Nenets and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Districts, in Siberia and in the south of the European part of the country, as well as the Neptune oilfield in the Sea of Okhotsk and the Prirazlomnoye oilfield in the Arctic. The main sales regions for Gazprom Neft products are Russia, the CIS countries, and Europe. Gazprom Neft’s own network of filling stations operates on this territory. Gazprom Neft subsidiaries sell aviation and marine fuels, lubricants and oils to 72 countries around the world.
In the spring of 2018, the studio team spent 10 days on the Yamal Peninsula to make industrial and image-building photographs for PAO Gazprom Neft. We photographed the infrastructure of the Novoportovskoye oilfield and the operation of the Gates of the Arctic port, the only marine terminal in the world located in the fresh waters beyond the Arctic Circle. The results of this photography are available on the website here.
On one day, we got on the Trekol all-terrain vehicles, which are the main vehicles in the winter in Yamal, and went far into the tundra to a real tepee of reindeer herders. It took 7 hours to get one way! We went to photograph a family of the Nenets people, representatives of the small people of the North.
PAO Gazprom Neft has long supported indigenous peoples of the North living in the company’s production areas — the Yamalo-Nenets and Khanty-Mansi Autonomous districts. Representatives of the company study the traditional life of the small northern peoples and help them by providing building materials and tools, clothes and money. We went to one of such reindeer herding families. The image-building photography lasted one day. During this time, we made portraits of the family members, their traditional dwellings and the area where the Nenets breed deer.
Then we continued shooting at one of the main sights of Yamal — the permafrost storage near the village of Novy Port. This one-kilometer-long permafrost storage was built in the 1950s. It was planned to store there the freshly caught fish from the Gulf of the Ob, the largest in the Kara Sea. The permafrost storage is a long tunnel cut in permafrost, with 200 caverns on the sides. All year round, the air temperature here is maintained at -15 to -17 °C. Gazprom Neft uses the photographs in its reports and materials in the programs for supporting the indigenous peoples of the North, as well as for press publications on the topic of northern peoples and work in Yamal. For example, our photograph was used for the recent article in Discovery.