Andrew mcconnell photographer biography

“I found a people largely uninterested in the space travellers and yet somehow bound up in this strange ritual. These descendants of nomads once again on the edge of a new horizon”.

Some Worlds Have Two Suns by Irish photographer Andrew McConnell, documents the comings and goings of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in rural Kazakhstan, and the lives of the local community whose existence is intertwined—almost accidentally—with this portal to space.

Every three months, a space rocket carrying three astronauts and cosmonauts, bound for the International Space Station, launches from Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian-operated spaceport in the remote Ulytau Region of central Kazakhstan. Around the same time, in the grasslands a little to the northeast, another returns to Earth.

Northern Ireland-born Andrew McConnell began his career as a press photographer for a daily newspaper in Be