Winner of the LensCulture art photography awards, 2023
Les Rencontres de la Photographie Marrakech winner, 2024
Copenhagen Photo Festival selectee, 2024Grant recipient, Documenting Ukraine, IVM Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, 2024
In January 2022, while strolling through Kyiv and its outskirts, I encountered a big, rotten pile of chairs. Nothing special. But the way this structure combined both chaos and fragile beauty struck me with an impulse to make this moment unending so I could come back to it later.
Epitome is a fairly personal visual journey — my attempt to look at some things more than once. It consists of pictures shot in war-torn places I was visiting in two subsequent years (2022–2023) and pictures printed from my archive of previous years. The process of making the palm-sized prints became, for me, a meditation, an urge to find personal balance, and contemplative search for meaning in a wartime reality.
While navigating the wounded land, I look for a glimmer of hope in people and places. I keep coming back to the same trinity that absorbed me — the soil, body, and warmth of a distant landscape. For me, uncertainty, fragility, and chaos, but also tenderness and hope, are the real essence of the series.
Learn more about the series from the essay by Joanna CresswellEpitome monograph book by Void is out. Order here