A Photographer Shot a Series of Buildings "Between Real and Fake." He Calls Them "Potemkin Villages"

"Their existence is a silhouette of our era."

Decaying buildings in Russia dressed in ornate facades. A European-style town in Shanghai, China. Military training bases in the United States that mimic the conditions of Middle Eastern cities...

They were built for different reasons, but they have one thing in common: they sit somewhere between real and fake. They physically exist, and yet, in a sense, each of them plays a part that isn't its own. Beginning in 2015, an Austrian photographer named Gregor Sailer spent two years traveling the world, camera in hand, looking for the buildings he calls "Potemkin villages." In showing them, he also asks the people who look at his photographs to think alongside him about the relationship between the real and the false.

"At the start I was interested in artificial fake buildings, knockoff buildings — buildings that sit between the real and the fake. Later I found that Potemkin-village-style buildings exist, and I tried to capture them. Their existence is a silhouette of our era," Gregor Sailer, 38, told QDaily.

Sailer crossed three continents and seven countries — Russia, Sweden, Germany, France, England, the United States and China — and recorded 25 such buildings with his camera. He collected the pictures into a book called The Potemkin Village.

"By presenting them to the eyes of the onlooker, Sailer initiates an examination of the absurdity that is often present in today's society," reads the description of the project on Sailer's website.

The name comes from a story out of Russian history, and now stands for any building or measure meant to leave a false impression. In 1787, when Catherine II toured Crimea, won in the Russo-Turkish War, the military leader Grigory Potemkin staged an elaborate deception for the visiting officials in order to manufacture an air of prosperity — including freshly painted house fronts made to look like real villages. Thousands of peasants are said to have been organized to play along with the display. (A century after Potemkin's death, his name was given to the battleship Potemkin, which became famous in the Russian Revolution of 1905. Sergei Eisenstein's celebrated silent film Battleship Potemkin gives a fictionalized account of the ship.)

The story behind the term, and the way Sailer came to the idea, both have to do with political illusion and propaganda. But the buildings in the project are not confined to politics. They also include military bases in the United States that simulate foreign settings, and a New York-themed town in Sweden used to test cars (Sailer doesn't know why that Swedish town chose to recreate the look of Harlem). "These are part of the Potemkin Village project too, just not for political purposes," Sailer said.

The first contemporary Potemkin villages Sailer saw were near copies of the original. Both had to do with Russia, where the term was born, and both served political ends: to greet a visit from President Putin, buildings in Suzdal, a city northeast of Moscow, were draped in canvas painted with clean windows and storeys, making for a tidy view. The same trick turned up later in Ufa, capital of the Russian republic of Bashkortostan, this time to please officials visiting for the BRICS summit.

"This is the classic Potemkin village," Sailer said. "But I wanted a wider angle. So I kept researching, and I found military operations on urban terrain, which exist all over the world. They focus on urban warfare training."

These bases, built to imitate foreign city terrain, are meant to prepare soldiers to fight in other countries. In the United States there is the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, which reproduces an Iraqi town, mosque included. In France there is the base at Sissonne, with its assorted European-style churches and farmhouses.

Russia's Potemkin villages stand in plain sight; the military bases are far better hidden. From finding a contact to shooting on site to the review afterward, Sailer ran into limits at every stage of photographing them.

He looked for information about the bases online, because it rarely appears in printed public material, and he had to compare sources to weed out what was false. Once he settled on a place, he applied — and then came all the checks on his background and his reasons for shooting. "Investigating and organizing a shoot often takes longer than the shoot itself," Sailer said.

Even on site he could not pick his angles freely; he had to work under the direction of official minders. Afterward he had to hand over the pictures, which could only be published once they passed review.

"But I always expect this in advance, and I take it into account in the language of the photographs," Sailer said. "That's why most of my pictures pass."

Strict as the process is, it has still left room for interesting encounters.

"They — the soldiers and the staff — were curious about me, they wanted to know why a photographer would be interested in this," Sailer said. "To them it's just the place where they train. They don't see any aesthetic meaning in these artificial buildings."

Once they got to know one another, the soldiers were glad to talk, and through his lens they got a chance to look again at things they saw every day. One staff member at Fort Irwin even asked Sailer whether the mosque there could pass for real.

The language barrier kept Sailer from talking to anyone local while he was shooting Thames Town. He had asked the Austrian Consulate General in Shanghai for help; it agreed to arrange his itinerary, then stopped replying. Sailer came to Shanghai and shot on his own. He never spoke with the people there, but they became an important element of the project — in fact the Thames Town pictures are the only ones in the Potemkin Village project with people in them, because the people had joined in the Potemkin village themselves.

Thames Town, in Shanghai's Songjiang district, has been described as a "ghost town." Many buyers treated the houses as an investment, so the share of people living there permanently is very low, and plenty of bars and shops are shut. (Sailer said he had heard that China has a fair number of ghost towns, but the idea of a ghost town was not the point of the Potemkin Village project.) Tourists, at least, bring the place a little life.

"In that artificial space, people start taking pictures, and by doing so they take on a role in the game," Sailer said. "That's why I put them in the photographs; you don't see people anywhere else in the project. Generally I'm more interested in the motives behind their behavior than in the portraits themselves."

To the visitors, Sailer's presence made this European-themed town feel more like the real thing. They took him for part of some installation artwork. That produced another curious exchange: as Sailer pointed his lens at the buildings of Thames Town, tourists pointed their cameras at Sailer and his fancy camera. His dealings with the place were finished off in the click of shutters.

Sailer prefers buildings to people, as the other projects on his website also show. The architecture in his pictures has a coarse, gritty texture rather than a grand or ornate one.

"It's a conscious choice," Sailer said. "As far as possible I present photographs in a calm, neutral way rather than a noisy one, because noise distracts the viewer."

The information a photograph carries, Sailer believes, is not so obvious that it can be read at a glance; as a photographer, his job is to strip out the distractions. And viewers who want to dig into the details and the meaning behind a picture have to spend the time — read the book, go to the exhibition.

Gray is a common key in the Potemkin Village photographs. Sailer uses that neutral tone to string together buildings from different places.

Sailer, born in Tyrol, Austria, began exploring the world with a present he got at the age of ten. That Christmas he owned his first mini camera.

At 17 he began to think seriously about photography as a career. After his military service he started studying it properly, taking photography courses at two universities in Germany. When the first stretch of study ended, he took part-time graphic design work to pay for his living costs and the rest of his education. While still a student, he made a point of going out into the market to find places that would publish his work.

Eight years ago Sailer went freelance full time. His main field of work and source of income is the art market, and he also takes on commissions. Freelancing, in his words, has not been easy, especially early on, when he had to bear the cost of a project without knowing whether anyone would like it or buy it.

Sailer is now the father of four — "they always want to eat, and a household of six hasn't made photography easy" — and only in recent years, as his contacts in the media and in publishing have built up, has life become a little easier. He now has regular collaborators, writers and publishers among them: Kehrer Verlag, which published The Potemkin Village, is working with him for the second time.

"But the main thing is still that your story and your pictures have to be good," Sailer said. "If people see something they haven't seen before, they'll pay attention, or write something about it."

His first project with Kehrer Verlag, "Closed Cities," also left a mark on Sailer — it cost him physically and mentally.

In "Closed Cities," Sailer pointed his lens at hidden pieces of architecture, ringed by walls or sealed off by the buildings around them, the kind of place people ordinarily cannot find. Raw material mines, military bases, refugee camps and communities reserved for the rich were all material for him.

"These temporarily sealed-off urban elements succinctly reflect the historical turning points the world has experienced at the turn of the 21st century: dwindling resources, climate change, political conflict and the desire for security," reads the official project description.

To find these hidden places, Sailer traveled to Algeria, Western Sahara, Argentina, Azerbaijan, Chile, Qatar and Russia. In the disputed territory of Western Sahara, the continuing conflict between the local independence movement, the Polisario Front, and the Kingdom of Morocco made his trip extraordinarily hard.

While looking for subjects, Sailer stood in front of scenes of refugees driven from their homes and wounded, which shook him badly, and his own safety was under threat too. As with the military bases in the Potemkin Village project, the military restricted what he could shoot.

"It was only after it was all over that I realized how hard the process had been. I paid a high price — I was hurt in body and mind, and it took months to recover before I had the mental energy to think up new stories," he said.

A number of photographers and their styles have worked quietly on Sailer's career: the German photographer Andreas Gursky, known for his large-format, panoramic pictures; the conceptual artist duo Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose technique is the deadpan shot; the Italian Walter Niedermayr, who studies spaces shaped and occupied by people and asks what they represent and what they leave to the imagination; and Lewis Baltz, a leading American photographer of the "New Topographics."

These days Sailer takes his inspiration more from subjects and stories than from other photographers. Once he finds an interesting thread — the idea of the Potemkin village, for instance — he keeps digging to see how far it goes. In the early stages he avoids looking at what other photographers have done in the same territory, so as not to be swayed. Only once he has a rough direction of his own does he check whether anyone else has done something similar, or take a lesson from them.

"I've tried going to places that look cool first and then thinking up a story, but it has never worked," Sailer said. "So I need the story first. That's my biggest source of inspiration."

Sometimes an idea cannot be carried out at all. Politics, military conflict, or a company covering up a dirty deal can all become obstacles he cannot get past.

Take the Potemkin Village project: Sailer did not photograph everything he had planned. His attempt to get at Gijeong-dong, in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, ended in a dead end. Western media call the place the "propaganda village." The North Korean government says it is a collective farm of 200 families, with a kindergarten, primary and secondary schools and a hospital. South Korea says it is an uninhabited propaganda village built in 1950 to lure South Koreans into defecting, and that the people living there are soldiers of the Korean People's Army, who maintain the bunkers and underground shelters along the border.

North Korea let Sailer into the country but not into the village. South Korea only let him shoot from two kilometers away, which was not close enough for a picture he was happy with. "Even though I knew beforehand it probably wouldn't work, I tried anyway," Sailer said.

He was turned down again in areas restricted by the Israeli military. He talked to the Israeli side for months and at one point saw hope, but in the end no permission came.

Potemkin-village-style buildings exist in his home country too. "But I didn't find a chapter there strong enough to stand on its own in this project," Sailer said. Many of the points he wanted to make were already made in the other photographs. Besides, Sailer had explored Austria, a country tied up with mountain myth, years earlier.

"At a certain point in the shooting I felt it was enough, that I had enough different material to say what I wanted to say. After that, more pictures would only say the same thing. Once I got to that point — for the Potemkin Village project, 25 buildings in seven countries — I made the choice that this was enough," he said.

The cover image and the photographs in this article were provided by the subject and the publisher Kehrer Verlag. You can see more of his work on Gregor Sailer's website.