An explosion high in the sky, an object at first just a silver dot comes into view, floating to earth on a parachute, landing with a thud and a cloud of dust.
It’s a capsule from a spacecraft. There is a rush to open the hatch, and out step three cosmonauts.
“My heart gave a skip when I saw that in a TV documentary,” says photographer Andrew McConnell. “It was 2014 and I had just returned from filming the conflict in Gaza, where I had witnessed the very worst of humanity, yet here were humans working together and achieving the seemingly impossible. I resolved to go and see it for myself.”
The result was a collection of photographs in his book Some Worlds Have Two Suns. But the result was not what he intended.
Cosmonauts had been blasted into space from a launch pad in Kazakhstan regularly since 1967 to work in the International Space Station. Three months later they would return to Earth in the tiny capsule, a mere 2.2 metres long and just as wide at its maximum, bumping down on the same few square miles of the country’s bleak steppes.
McConnell’s plan was to photograph the faces of the cosmonauts, to take portraits that captured the drama they must have felt working on the space station, to reveal the high emotion that such an adventure aroused. Surely their faces would tell their own story of courage, determination, even bravado, which would reflect the quixotic fact that they had briefly inhabited two worlds.
He quickly discovered just how mundane space travel could be, at least as far as the cosmonauts were concerned. “They land, they are taken out, plopped down on a chair, handed a phone to call home, given a hat and sunglasses to protect their eyes, and then sort of sit there smiling with blank expressions while the press and the space organisations fuss around.
“The fact is,” he laughs, “when you’ve seen one astronaut, you’ve seen them all.”
While he pondered what to do, a group of villagers from the nearest community came by. He turned his camera towards them and soon found they were more interesting than the cosmonauts. What seemed to him at first to be a “boundless void” was crowded with “unexpected details”.
He was to make many trips to the region between 2015 and 2023, often staying in the same village, getting to know the people, their nomadic heritage and their mysteries, which helps to explain why the first image in the book is not of a cosmonaut but of an old man standing in a snowy waste, stick in hand, hat and overcoat tightly bound by a broad belt. Behind him, the steppe seems to go on for ever, featureless apart from a strip of trees on the horizon separating the dirty white land from the slate of the sky. You can feel the cold.
Turn the page to find a track lined with walls of snow that have been thrown up by the plough as it cleared the way through. A solitary bird perching on a lump of ice emphasises the sheer emptiness of it all. We see a dog ambling through a cemetery towards a distant horizon, made all the more desolate because the snow is grey. It has been polluted by emissions from the nearby steelworks – pictured on another page in all its industrial monstrosity – which blacken the snow as they fall.
But the comfortless mood is cheered by a man standing proudly in his modest kitchen next to a table laden with cakes and bread; a lady in the colourful garb of the region poses awkwardly in her home; lads cavort in a river in the summer, when the glum monotone of winter is replaced by green fields and blue skies.
But McConnell challenges our perceptions by changing tack. He transports us to a landscape littered with the flotsam and jetsam of space travel, nose cones and abandoned bits of metal. He reminds us what his project was intended to be about with a rocket menacingly poised on the launch pad preparing to take its three passengers into space.
With such contrasting images it’s hard to nail down a theme. Apart from a brief statement at the end of the book by the photographer himself there is no attempt to provide a context, no picture captions, not even page numbers. McConnell says: “As a press photographer I was always trying to explain everything to the viewer. Here I’d rather they experience it for themselves, bring their own ideas to it.”
What is evident is that the bits and bobs of redundant space machinery play only a small part in McConnell’s observations of this remote world. A boy in a balaclava and a red coat plays in the yard of his home with his sister. His home is simple, made of concrete with a tin roof and boasting a huge TV satellite dish. In the yard alongside crates of empty bottles is a nose cone from a capsule. Its use? As a coal store.
In another scene, a girl balances on a discarded shard of spaceware while making a fence with a sheet of fibreglass from an abandoned capsule.
A young lad in grubby anorak and trousers sits rather defiantly on a begrimed armchair surrounded by the detritus of a landfill site. Smoke rises gently by his feet, caused by the permanent fires of rubbish that burn just below the surface. It’s reminiscent of the smoke that billows out at a rocket launch just before take off.
McConnell contrasts a sports hall shaped like an enormous yurt, in which players plan tactics for a football match, with a table of food (for no obvious reason other than the delicious symmetry of the fare on display) and with horses trotting in the snow in search of feed past eerily abandoned flats. Two venerable sisters, maybe twins, in similar red coats and gay headgear stand hand in hand.
He is keen to point out the bird’s nest with four perfect eggs and the tumbleweed he found in a deserted home, shaped in a strangely beautiful filigree. “Nature at its most sublime is a wondrous thing,” he muses.
The longer he spent in the area, the more he came to understand that the people were not terribly interested in the space travellers but were nonetheless connected to the “strange ritual” of the landings. He chanced on a family group gathered on a rock, apparently in prayer or some ancient ritual, and as he photographed the scene the sense of connection between such earthly devotions and the distant world visited by the space travellers was palpable to him.
Again, he found something mystical about the time he was camping in the shadow of ancient tombs when a Soyuz landed nearby. Was it too fanciful to compare the cone-like structure of the tombs with the capsule?
While he pondered that, out of the mist rode two men on horseback, drawn, perhaps, to that very spot by the ritual of the intergalactic ferry service.
“I wanted to reflect the idea of being on the threshold of our world and that other world up there,” says McConnell. “These descendants of nomads are once again on the edge of a new horizon.”
Some Worlds Have Two Suns by Andrew McConnell is published by Gost, £60
