Evgenia Arbugaeva: Arctic Stories, The Photographers' Gallery

Evgenia Arbugaeva is best known as a photographer of the Arctic. With an eye for both landscape and portraiture, she chronicles a lived environment that is as beautiful as it is inhospitable.

Opening on November 6 at the Photographer’s Gallery, Arctic Stories is her first UK exhibition. It comprises two bodies of work. The first, Tiksi (2009-2012), is a portrayal of the artist’s hometown: a remote, depopulating Siberian port. White expanses predominate, but these are not images devoid of colour. Rather, they are enlivened by sudden shocks: the pastel green of a building’s paintwork or the festive red of a fisherman’s hat. Nor are they empty of human life; a local girl named Tanya is the project’s muse, and one of several people to animate these haunting images.

Taken over a two-week period, Weather Man (2013) documents the daily life of Vyacheslav Korotki, a meteorologist living on a remote peninsula. The work is a character study in the truest sense, offering us insight into a life of radical isolation. Primarily, these are photographs of work - of study and observation – with occasional glimmers of leisure.

Born in 1985, Arbugaeva is a young talent whose work is at once hard-bitten and romantic. Head to the Photographer’s Gallery from November 6 to see it for yourself.