Award-winning photographer and filmmaker Andrew McConnell has dedicated his career to illuminating the world’s overlooked regions and underreported stories. He has a distinctive ability to examine major global issues and events from fresh, often unexpected perspectives. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances are the focus of McConnell’s lens. From conflict zones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the hidden lives of the Sahrawi people in Western Sahara, his work frequently highlights human endurance in challenging environments.

His new book, Some Worlds Have Two Suns, takes a different direction. It explores the vast, remote Kazakh Steppe, where the sparse local population coexists with the high-tech world of space travel. The project began in 2014 after he filmed his documentary Gaza. While decompressing at home in Ireland, he watched a BBC documentary about a Soyuz spacecraft landing in the Kazakh Steppe. The stark contrast between destruction and human achievement struck him. “I turned to my parents and said, ‘I’m gonna go and see that.’” That moment sparked an eight-year journey documenting the Russian ground crews recovering astronauts and the communities living beneath these celestial homecomings.

TCA: You visited the Kazakh Steppe multiple times to document the Soyuz landings. How many trips did you make and what were the challenges of reaching such a remote location?

Andrew: I probably made a dozen. I would join the ground crew in Karaganda, which is not far from Astana, and from there they head out to the Steppe, and depending on whether it’s winter or summer they have different vehicles for either one. In summer, the Steppe is fine to drive on, so they have four by fours and we head out and set up camp the day before the Soyuz arrives. They know the exact time the Soyuz will land, right down to the second, and it always goes to the same location, which is a group of tombs. You can see those in the book, the two horsemen beside these tombs. These are old nomadic burial tombs, maybe 300 years old, so that, initially, was very interesting to me… you know, what are these? The Steppe is this unending boundless void of nothingness, just flat grassland. At first, as a photographer, it was quite underwhelming because visually, how do you make that interesting? But here were these tombs in the middle of nowhere and it was instantly fascinating. That was always the base camp. I don’t know if that’s where Rocosmos aimed Soyuz, but that’s where it came into the atmosphere every time I saw it. It would enter the atmosphere above these tombs. The parachute deploys and then it depends on the wind because they can drift for 20 kilometers. A couple of times it was a windless day, and the Soyuz dropped within sight of these tombs. I had a fantasy that it would drop in the middle of it.

Nomadic burial tombs, Soyuz landing zone, Kazakhstan, 2018; image: Andrew McConnell

TCA: What shifted your focus from the astronaut activity to the communities that live in that region?

Andrew: I became interested in the locals from the very first landing. On a beautiful June afternoon, Soyuz was on the ground, and the astronauts and cosmonauts were taken out, and a little press core was gathered around doing their thing. Astronauts were smiling for the cameras, and so I was looking at this thing that was a little bit too staged for my liking. Then on the horizon, this little white car appeared, a little Lada, and it drove up to us. These massive helicopters were sitting on the plain and the car weaved its way through, and about eight people dropped out. They were all obviously local men, farmers, and they had come to see the spaceship that landed in their backyard, so to speak, and I was instantly fascinated by this. I hadn’t imagined people living here, but there are a few settlements dotted around. The closest one is 30 kilometers away, so that really piqued my interest. For the next few visits, I still photographed Soyuz landings. On the way out to the landing site, we would pass through one of these villages. They had space junk, and they were using it for various purposes, like fences, maybe rooftops… garages. There was a coal bunker that was built out of the nose cone of a rocket. I would pass through this village, and I had to get back there, you know. So that began the other side of the story. I had to find a fixer. I found a photographer in Astana who was prepared to go with me there because I couldn’t stop there with the ground crew. They had a mission and there was no time to stop.

We drove to this village, I had to kind of remember the way — a telegraph pole or a shrub — because there’s nothing, no guiding markers. I remember the first time we went, we got lost and had to backtrack to the main road and we stayed in a little guest house overnight and then tried again the next morning. Eventually, we found the village two hours off the main road, and then I began my work with the locals. I’m getting to know them and starting to spend more time with them and understand their culture and their way of life. Everyone welcomes you in. Sure enough, the first house we came to in the village, we knocked on the door, said hello, and were welcomed in. That became the family that I stayed with over the years, and we became good friends. That culture of hospitality was wonderful. They allowed me to spend time in the local culture.

Rocket parts, near Kenjebai-Samai, Kazakhstan, 2019; image Andrew McConnell

TCA: Could you share some of the most surprising or moving discoveries you encountered in this landscape?

Andrew: The open pit, the coal mine. It’s one of the biggest in the world and it’s massive. The world you see in this book is sort of a wounded world; you see the marks, the scars that humans have made on it, which feeds into other bigger themes in the book. It’s suggested but not said, but why are we leaving this planet to search in the cosmos? I hint at the environmental aspect, the damage humans are doing to this world. Obviously, Kazakhstan is a huge producer of coal, gas, and oil. So the open pit — the coal mine — was just stunning. I mean, to see how deep it went down into the earth. Steel is a huge industry there. I went to one of the towns that has a huge steel plant. You see this in the picture of the dog walking into the cemetery and you see where the snow has been plowed, and some of it’s white, but the rest of the landscape is gray. That is pollution from the steel plant. And you see the dogs running along the pipes. That’s the actual steel plant in Temirtaul, which is near Karaganda. So yeah, it hints at the negative aspects of what humanity is doing to the planet.

Steelwork plant, Temirtau, Kazakhstan, 2017; image: Andrew McConnell

These were surprises when I came across them on the landscape. Also the ancient elements of our civilization, like the petroglyphs. Some of them are quite close to the landing zone. Terekty — the big rock there — has carvings of horses and other animals on it. I think those are like 2,000 years old. There are other ones further south in Tamgaly, they’re even older and incredible, these rock carvings that we know very little about. And in such a contrast to cosmonauts and astronauts coming down in spacecraft, can you imagine this in the same space? I mean, this was extraordinary to me. These two things exist in the same place. Here we have elements of our past and our future colliding. It’s where we’ve come from and where we’re going.

Petroglyphs, Terekty, Kazakhstan, 2017; image: Andrew McConnell

TCA: Are these communities aware of the larger significance of their proximity to space program activity?

Andrew: Usually, [the astronauts] spend six months on the space station. Every three months there would be a launch. It’s changed a bit now. That’s the way it was for many years, but now that SpaceX has come along, I think it’s down to every six months. It’s certainly less because the Americans don’t need to use Roscosmos as much. They do still send the occasional NASA astronaut with the Soyuz, but it’s not like it was. That’s part of the story too, when America decommissioned the Shuttle in 2011, Kazakhstan became the sole route to and from the space station, and the Soyuz was the only way to get to the space station. So that meant there was a lot of traffic. Americans would pay… I think it was $80 million per seat on the Soyuz. So this was the heyday for Kazakhstan. It’s faded now, and that’s part of the story. I don’t know that Kazakhstan will ever be what it was in terms of the center of space travel. So now fewer astronauts are going with the Soyuz.

The locals don’t really pay much attention to it. They know this thing happens, but it’s sort of over there in the distance, and they’re not that interested, to be honest. They collect the space junk. That’s practical usage. But they don’t know when the spacecraft will land and have no notification of this. With the reentry, they hear the explosion in the sky, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, there must be another.” They rarely came out to see it. And when I would stay in the village with them, they would ask me, “This stuff, this space junk, is it radioactive… is there radiation on it?” That was their main concern. And then they would say, “Every time a rocket goes up, the weather changes.” I spoke to this old lady — you see a picture of her in the book standing with her walking stick — that’s what she would say. I heard that a lot. There’s a superstition around it. A couple of times the men on horseback arrived to watch it. I think they were in the area, and they saw it on the parachute, and they would come over to see what was happening, but apart from that, no one would show up.

Tukenova and Metzhanova, Karaganda region, Kazakhstan, 2018; image: Andrew McConnell

TCA: You mentioned that the locals were very welcoming, but in light of this general disinterest, how did they respond to your reasons for being there?

Andrew: I think they were bemused by my interest in this. They didn’t get it or understand why I was interested. When I asked them, can you bring me out and show me where this space junk lands, they quickly gathered around and discussed who could take me. Then they went and knocked on a door where there was a guy with a truck, and he agreed to take me. I was a few kilometers into the Steppe — kind of off-road — into this grassland, and not many people knew where that was, but there was an area, and you see that picture in the book of all this space junk just lying on the grass. But you know, for them, their life revolves around horses. That’s their source of income out there and they have big herds. So the fact that this space activity happens now and again doesn’t benefit them in any way apart from the junk. There’s no financial benefit.

Beknur plays on space junk near her home, Kenjebai-Samai, Kazakhstan, 2022; image: Andrew McConnell

TCA: The juxtaposition of space exploration with the grounded, rural life of the Kazakh Steppe is striking. How did you balance these contrasting worlds in your photography?

Andrew: That was maybe the most difficult part of pulling this body of work together; how do you put an astronaut alongside a shepherd and have it so it’s not jarring, you know? I mean, I struggled with that for a long time. I was doing two projects at once. I went to Baikonur, too. I saw two launches. And then I’d be in a little settlement on the Steppe with shepherds, and that was the crux of it, that whole thing, right, to look at this contrast. And it took a long time trying to sequence edit the work in a way that wouldn’t jar, so that as you turn the page it would play out coherently. I think I got it eventually, but it was tough. For many years it didn’t work. I was perplexed and scratching my head a lot wondering what I was gonna do, but I just kept staying the course and it eventually started to come together in the last two years of work. I wasn’t able to go to Kazakhstan during the pandemic, so for two and a half years I didn’t visit. It was useful because I didn’t look at the work for over a year, and eventually, I took it out again. I started to look at it with fresh eyes. Once Kazakhstan opened up again, I was able to go. It was good because I was able to target the imagery that I wanted and the gaps that existed in the body of work.

TCA: On a broader scale, how did your relationship to the two themes — humanity and space exploration — evolve over the years?

Andrew: Elements of the Steppe brought out the nomadic theme of the culture of Kazakhstan, how the Steppes were populated, and how horses fed into that. It struck me that the horses were so important to the culture of Kazakhstan. Horses allowed humans to wander out further… travel further, and populate new lands. I think you can draw on that… there’s a comparison between the horse and the Soyuz. You know, it’s like the modern-day version of the horse and we’re not traveling across the Steppe anymore, but we’re traveling into the heavens; it’s the same thing. It’s in our nature to want to explore and find out what’s over the horizon. And we’ve done that now. We’ve exhausted that on this planet, and it’s completely natural that we are now going toward the stars. It’s probably our destiny in the end. The fact that this plays out on the Steppe, and you have this collision of the past and the future right here in the most surprising of environments is kind of at the heart of the work. So I tried to tease this theme out. I mean, it’s subtle. One element of the book is about where we’ve come from and where we’re going.

TCA: People often view space exploration as a symbol of technological achievement and human progress, yet you focus on it through the lens of rural Kazakhstan. What do you hope audiences will take away from seeing space exploration from the ground up among the people who live there?

Andrew: Good question. I think there’ll be more questions and less answers. I would hope there are various interpretations. Certainly, one is probably questioning our places in the world and our effect on this planet, what has that been, and perhaps what is the price we’re paying for progress? It’s like when we dig down into the earth. The energy we need to fuel these things to go up and to go further and further. What is the price for that? There’s a lot of talk now of colonizing Mars and do we need a new home planet. I think that’s really interesting. Should we be trying to protect and help our planet, our own home before thinking of abandoning it and trying a new one? Everything we need is right here and so that’s part of it, but also just the wonder of the world that we live in because it is an extraordinary place. You think you’ve seen it all, but the world keeps surprising us. I hope people will take that away, a bit of the wonder. I think it gets lost in the pace of modern-day living. This Earth is still full of surprises.

Coal mine, Ekibastuz, Kazakhstan, 2016; image: Andrew McConnell

TCA: Your career began covering the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Outside of Some Worlds Have Two Suns, how has that experience shaped your approach to documenting conflict and displacement?

Andrew: I was exposed to the images that were being made in the north of Ireland during those times so that certainly drew me into photojournalism. I was drawn in by the power of that imagery. I never wanted to be a conflict photographer. I have ended up documenting conflict, but I would like to think from a different perspective. My takeaway from growing up amidst conflict was that living in that environment is actually — most of the time — ordinary, and it’s punctuated by terrifying moments. But the majority of the time, you’re just living an ordinary life. That’s more interesting to me than the man firing the gun, which is what a lot of imagery gravitates towards, but it’s the people just getting by when the guns are not being fired that’s interesting.

Horses and their owners take a dip in the Mediterranean Sea off Gaza City, Gaza Strip. The sea is a much needed distraction from the struggles of daily life in Gaza; image: Andrew McConnell

And that’s why — when I went to Gaza — I focused on surfing, which was more fascinating to me than the other stuff that was going on because that had been heavily documented. Here were people in the midst of really difficult circumstances making the best of life, and that’s what people do all over the world if they’re in conflict zones.