Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Hyperborea: Stories from the Arctic gathers a decade of photography made across the Russian Arctic, from the remote coast of Siberia to the region where the photographer grew up, Tiksi, on the Laptev Sea. Published by Thames & Hudson in 2023, the book is conceived as a career-to-date retrospective: photographs from the full range of Arbugaeva’s series and travels are brought together to describe a geography through its inhabitants, animals, weather, and immense, often desolate spaces.

Arbugaeva’s subject is not the Arctic as spectacle alone. Her images attend to the relationship between human life and the land, sky, climate, and cycles of isolation that shape it. The photographs are rigorously composed yet carry a palpable physical intensity: colour glows against snow and darkness, while quiet scenes retain the pressure of an inhospitable environment. This tension between dreamlike appearance and lived extremity gives the work its distinctive register, allowing the Arctic to emerge as both a real territory and a place long charged with longing and imagination.

The book’s retrospective structure is supported by an introduction from Piers Vitebsky, four texts by Arbugaeva, and a specially commissioned map locating the photographs. These elements do more than annotate the images; they establish personal, geographic, and conceptual bearings for a body of work made through long-term visits and sustained encounters with remote communities. The result is a considered account of place rather than a sequence of isolated impressions.

For collectors, Hyperborea deserves attention as a substantial statement of Arbugaeva’s photographic practice and as an English-language volume that brings its Arctic work into a coherent whole. Its 112 pages, hardcover format, and carefully expanded textual and cartographic framework make it especially suited to close, repeated reading—where the beauty of the images is inseparable from the fragility of the environments and lives they portray.