In Igor Elukov’s The Book of Miracles, the Russian North is not merely a backdrop but a protagonist—an elemental force that resists definition, resists capture, and yet becomes the essential material of his semi-fictional, semi-documentary photographs.
Working against the vastness and visual mutability of the tundra, Elukov constructs scenes that feel both premodern and post-apocalyptic, staged yet surrendered to the conditions of the land. His project reads like a dialogue with a landscape that refuses to be reduced to a single gesture.
Raised in Arkhangelsk, Elukov approaches the tundra not as an outsider but as someone fluent in its illusions—the way distance collapses, how weather mutates scale, how silence can feel both sacred and volatile. For this project, he brought a production team of forty into the North, transporting installations, props, and livestock into zones where the horizon often appears to erase itself. This is not photography as extraction or spectacle; it is a form of pilgrimage, each image assembled through a blend of stubborn human intention and the capricious moods of the Arctic climate.
One of the project’s anchor images—cows surrounded by an incoming tide—demonstrates Elukov’s appetite for complexity. The team searched for an island that could support both animals and the cinematic vision he carried in mind, only to abandon the idea and build their own landform instead. After weeks of waiting, the shoot condensed into forty minutes of frantic choreography: animals to position, water rising, light slipping away. Then the improbable happened—the weather calmed, the light softened, and the fabricated island dissolved seamlessly into a pastoral apparition that feels older than photography itself.
There is a tactile insistence in Elukov’s process, a commitment to real materials and real hazards that echoes early cinema. His fascination with Buster Keaton is not nostalgic; it is methodological. Like Keaton’s physical stunts and mechanical illusions, Elukov’s scenes depend on tangible effort—moving earth, navigating animals, building structures that can withstand wind, salt water, or fire. Fire, in fact, entered the project almost by accident when a foam-rubber camera accessory ignited during a shoot near metal smelters in the Kola Peninsula. He describes this as a discovery, the missing alchemical element needed to complete his cosmology of wind, water, snow, and moon.
Though the work follows Severe, his earlier documentary on the Russian North, The Book of Miracles moves into a different register. The new series strips the landscape down to primal forces and treats each photograph as a singular cosmological event, not a chapter in a linear narrative. Elukov’s reference to the 16th-century Augsburg Book of Miracles becomes less about religious portent and more about cosmocentrism: a worldview in which humans are simply one presence among many, fragile and provisional, unable to fully comprehend the systems that sustain or destroy them.
The aura of danger in these images—tidal surges, icy winds, the eerie vacancy of the terrain—coexists with an austere beauty. The work sustains a tension between catastrophic potential and contemplative stillness. Even without human figures, the photographs feel profoundly human in their metaphysical questioning. They gesture toward an ecosystem where nothing can be neatly separated: person from landscape, landscape from cosmic forces, intention from accident. Elukov seeks a technology and a methodology that limit his control, allowing the elements themselves to articulate the final frame.
The result is a body of work that feels both ancient and startlingly current, echoing medieval attempts to map the inexplicable while acknowledging the limits of contemporary certainty. In The Book of Miracles, photography becomes a negotiation with forces that precede and outlast us—a search not for mastery but for harmony in a world that remains fundamentally unknowable.
