The descent into Astana was violent. No poetic abstraction needed, just sheer meteorological hostility. A violent storm, thick with snow and ice, somewhere between 10,000 feet and tarmac. Unaccustomed to Russian aircraft my tender, Boeing adjusted, ear drums ruptured under the sudden change in pressure. A fizz, then a sharp stabbing pain, then the surreal hush of your body forgetting how to balance itself. By the time I stumbled off the plane into Kazakhstan’s midnight wind, I could feel neither the air nor my own voice.
The next morning, one sickeningly painful flight from Astana, and I was in Almaty, a Soviet-modernist holdover that looked like a sequence of brutalist chess pieces, sprinkled with colourful blobs of western ambition.
We were there to photograph a school, new, elegant, humane. Designed with quiet intent, it nestled at the foot of the Trans-Ili Alatau mountains like a folded piece of origami sunk into the earth. Half-deaf and drugged, I rolled up my sleeves and got on with it.
My assistant, Morten; Danish, ex-military, unflappably calm, handled the equipment and the Russian pain killers. He was trained to abseil out of Black Hawk helicopters, burst eardrums were nothing to complain about, and he made sure I didn’t.
Then there was the graveyard. It was late afternoon, and I was scouting an elevated vantage point in the hills. Rows of rusted Orthodox crosses and crescent moon tombs tilted like tired metronomes. I wanted the school in long shadow, under a vivid sky. That’s when the dogs came. Wild, fast, and unreasonably aggressive. Our Kazakh bodyguard, Uzi equipped (like a Guy Ritchie extra) ran away. Fortunately even wild dogs understand British expletives, and thought better of it.
The school was built to survive the extremes of the Khazakstan climate, with spaces for children to learn under filtered daylight, to read near radiant floor vents, to play under a parabolic skylight. Tough, resilient, uncompromising, much like the people and the place.
What I remember most, beyond the quiet hum of concussion in my skull, was the silence. The actual, clinical silence of my burst eardrums, yes. But also the metaphysical quiet of the building. It didn’t shout its design credentials. It didn’t reach for aesthetic approval. It simply existed in equilibrium with its mountain light, its students, its purpose.
Photography, like architecture, is not about showmanship. It’s about what remains in the frame after you’ve stripped away the noise. And sometimes, the only way to hear what a place is trying to say, is to lose the ability to hear at all.
