Rebecca Lilith Bathory

Early life and education

Bathory was born in Sutton, in Surrey, England. May 1, 1982. She graduated from University for the Creative Arts with a first class degree in Graphic Design in June 2006. Between 2008 and 2010 she studied for a master's degree in Fashion Photography at The London College of Fashion, for which she was awarded a distinction. She exhibited her final masters project, Edenias, at London's Mall Gallery.

In 2014 she was awarded a Techne scholarship for a research PhD degree at the University of Roehampton to research the photography of dark tourism.

Soviet Ghosts

Struck by the extent of abandonment in the former Soviet Union and what had been its satellite states, Bathory (as Rebecca Litchfield) records many abandoned locations within 10 countries, such as forgotten towns, factories, prisons, schools, monuments, hospitals, theatres, military complexes, asylums and death camps, not seen to most people who pass their boarded windows and fenced walls. These locations are imbued with a wealth of meaning and wonder and a history of their own. Bathory’s work shines a light on a society shrouded by the cold war, offering a document of the daily lives of the Soviet people.

Bathory's photographs show these forgotten historical locations and the ideologies that built them, and try to reawaken old narratives, find beauty and meaning in their decay and revive the memories ingrained in the detritus of a collapsed regime. The buildings will soon disappear, and as the memory of the former Soviet Union begins to fade, these places and the communities who once gave them life deserve to be recorded for posterity. They tell a story like artefacts in a museum. The book Soviet Ghosts (published in June 2014 by Carpet Bombing Culture) catches a strange interval between modernity and antiquity.

Return to Fukushima

Following on from her photographical journey behind the Iron Curtain in ‘Soviet Ghosts, The Soviet Union Abandoned: A Communist Empire in Decay’, her first book with Carpet Bombing Culture, Rebecca trains her lens on Fukushima to explore the Nuclear meltdown.

It is the worst nightmare of modern humanity. Forces we barely understand that seem so fundamentally powerful and dangerous that we think of them only in terms of profound unease. Isotopic radiation the worst of all monsters, the invisible fiend that can alter our very DNA.

An idea so terrifying that the thought of it alone kills more people than the effects of the isotopes. A thirty mile exclusion zone was established and a mass exodus of residents scattered out across Japan. Whole towns and villages were evacuated. Some villages were completely washed away by the sea. In these places, once called home, the clock stopped on 3/11. Cats and farm animals starved in the streets. Food rotted in restaurant bowls. Silence reigned. But this year, 2016, for the first time – residents of the town of Tomioka were given permission to return to walk their streets in the midst of a beautiful display of cherry blossom. Rebecca Bathory was finally given permission to photograph in the exclusion zone – to capture for future generations this dark yet hopeful moment in their history.

This collection of images is intended to capture the sadness of a moment in history, a moment that is relevant to us all as we are increasingly being forced to decide what our future will look like. The book Return to Fukushima (published in March 2017 by Carpet Bombing Culture) shows in the end, these macro-economic decisions are measured out in individual human lives, losses and hopes.

Exhibition

Awards