Jonas Bendiksen | Magnum Photos Kazakhstan. 2000.
“This band of scrap metal dealers in Kazakhstan must be some of the bravest people I’ve met. They make their living by collecting metal from crashed booster stages of rockets lau
(...) nched at the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport a few hundred kilometers away. To be successful in this competitive line of business, and to avoid metal falling into rival scrap dealer’s hands, they have to be as close as possible to where the space rockets come crashing down. This particular group had an inside contact within the space agency that gave out the exact coordinates where each rocket was expected to crash.
So, one day I found myself standing with them at the exact GPS coordinates where a 30-meter-long piece of metal was expected to fall from the skies, eagerly waiting for it to come hurling down. When it arrived with an earth-shattering bang (missing us), they got to work cutting metal. For them, this was just another day at the office. For me, it was one of the greatest and most bizarre adventures of my life.”
- Jonas Bendiksen © Jonas Bendiksen | Magnum Photos
