Time and again, the Paris-based photographer manages to captivate us. She takes the viewer to faraway locations: with delicate colours and sensitive images, she speaks of lesser known and wonderfully dreamlike places; yet she never drifts into nostalgia. Over recent decades, Central Asia, Crimea and Siberia have been her preferred areas of exploration. The distinguished photographer, who won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award in 1999, is presenting three series in an exhibition at the Leica Gallery Wetzlar – all taken with her analogue Leica M6.
In the mid-nineties, Doury explored Russia’s northern reaches, where she documented the lives and traditions of the last nomadic people living there. She covered thousands of kilometers, travelling from the Amur River, all the way to the lands beyond the Polar Circle. Her black and white LOBA series, The Last Nomads of Siberia, captured the tough everyday living conditions of the people who, even then, were caught between an omnipresent, but disappearing, cultural heritage and a rapidly changing world.

In the second series, Artek, Doury takes us to a youth summer recreation camp in Crimea. Established back in 1925, Artek had, once again, become a popular place for the children of privileged families in the post-Soviet era. Starting in 1994 and over a span of ten years, the photographer captured sensitive portraits of a generation in transition from child to adulthood. With a delicate feeling for the fragility of this phase of life, Doury took touching pictures that have lost none of their intimacy.
The third and most comprehensive part of the gallery exhibition is dedicated to pieces from her Loulan Beauty series, produced in Central Asia. “From 2002 to 2005, I was able to travel through the Aral region of Kazakhstan, to Uzbekistan, Xinjiang and on to the banks of the Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan,” Doury explains. The images depict poetic moments, portraying “the heirs of sunken kingdoms, fishermen without a sea, and children who dance to bring back their parents who work far away.”

In all three series, Doury asks fundamental questions that explore the relationship between people and nature, memory, transience and transition, loss, change and new beginnings; and she consistently proves herself a precise observer and empathic companion, who chooses not to reveal every secret.