Magnum Poster: Altai Territory, Russia, 2000

Jonas Bendiksen’s series Satellites is the culmination of several years travelling across the southern borderlands of the former USSR to explore the unrecognized states, breakaway republics and remote communities that were born out of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The project took Bendiksen from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, including the spacecraft crash zones between Russia and Kazakhstan. It is the latter of these that brought Bendiksen to the Altai Territory in Russia in 2000, where he took this photograph of villagers collecting scrap metal from the wreckage of a crashed spacecraft surrounded by thousands of white butterflies.