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 that stood there like a sculpture. I immediately found an emotional connection to this object: the way this structure combined both chaos and fragile beauty struck me with an impulse to capture this moment.
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.
Epitome monograph book by Void is out. Order here
Road and a pond as seen from the Kyiv-Lviv train window when I was traveling home. I made this photograph back in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas. When the Russian full-scale invasion started, all the photo shops closed, so I used the same photo fixer mixture until it was exhausted. Printed in 2022, this was the early piece accidentally bruised with the brown spots—and one of the first pictures that visually shaped the project. When I was printing the image in 2022 I realised that this landscape was seen by thousands if not millions (more than 5 million people fled)—it was one of the busiest routes for people escaping the war.
Sasha was born and raised in Mariupol, Donetsk region, Ukraine. His mother survived the occupation in Irpin. His father was listed dead for some time due to a mistake, and has survived the horrors of Mariupol. I made the photograph way before, in the summer of 2020, I first printed it in 2023 after I found it in my archive when looking for something else. Since then it has become one of the most recognizable pictures of the project. Its unusual for a portrait crop is informed by my interest in his stare, not his identity. Later, his skull features became the cover for the book, published by Void.
In January 2022, while strolling through Kyiv and its outskirts, I encountered a big, rotten pile of chairs that stood there like a sculpture. I immediately found an emotional connection to this object: the way this structure combined both chaos and fragile beauty struck me with an impulse to capture this moment. As soon as I took the first picture it started raining. I made a few quick frames and left the scene.
This photograph was shot in June of 2022 in Velyka Dymerka, Kyiv region after the withdrawal of Russian troops. It shows one of the thousands of Ukrainian houses destroyed by Russian bombs and one of the only few I used in the Epitome book. Despite shooting rolls and rolls of film of houses devastated by war, my personal goal was to convey the feeling of devastation and loss through other imagery.
For some reason, storks are the symbol of family well-being in Ukraine. This felt, for me, like a life-affirming moment— me being stared at the storks and them being stared back at by me.
This image was shot near Bohdanivka in the early summer of 2022, after the defeat and withdrawal of Russian troops from the region. At this time people began to return to their homes, which either survived or were destroyed.
I brought these flowers back to my home studio from one of my trips to photograph. Being one of the biggest exporters of the sunflower oil worldwide, the sunflower is one of the national symbols of Ukraine. The idea of sunflower seeds sprout out from the pockets of the dead enemy bodies became popular after a viral video about a brave civilian woman.
Deteriorated log wall used as a bullet stopper. It is severely damaged at the height of where the heart and the head would be. I made this photograph in the summer of 2022 at an open-air shooting gallery in the middle of Trukhaniv woods. This young man with a trident tattoo appears a few times throughout the book.
In March of 2022, a dam on the Irpin River was blown up by AFU (Ukrainian forces) to prevent the progress of Russian troops to Kyiv. Immediately, huge territories were flooded or became swamps. I visited this site in 2023 with my 4x5 camera to capture the flooded trees.
Shot originally in 2019, Valera is now serving in the undisclosed brigade of the AFU. In the Autumn of 2024, after my book Epitome was published, I met with him for the first time in five years to show him his portrait.
The village of Borodyanka had one row of residential high-rise buildings which were totally destroyed by deliberate or chaotic Russian bombing in the spring of 2022. I shot this scene in the early summer of 2022. This is one of the very few images in Epitome that has the urban feeling to it. I deliberately avoided the urban to be consistent with my love for rural places. I only noticed the bird after I took the picture.
Head from the Soviet monument of Ukrainian and Russian workers standing holding hands together. The huge hand of one of the workers pointed roughly in the direction of Moscow. Together with another granite sculpture (dismantled later in 2024), they formed an ensemble standing under the giant titanium arch which is now titled the Arch of Freedom of the Ukrainian People. In April 2022, I spent a few hours waiting for the workmen struggling to get this thing down.
Field IV
There is a big 20-page section in the book dedicated to the sunflower fields only. When there’s nobody to harvest the crop the flowers quickly start to dry. After a long stroll under the heat between Dymer and Hlibivka, I lay down between the dry flower trunks and point my Horizon panoramic camera upwards. Between the shots, the flowers appear looking at me from the top, the other time they are just going minding their business.
In the first weeks after the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Kyiv region, the first place I visited was Horenka, a village to the north west of Kyiv that was severely damaged by the invasion. Here, along with Irpin, Bucha, and Moschun, the bloody battle of Kyiv took place. The first person I encountered was a man whose entire house was destroyed by Russian bombs. He lived in a shed with his dog and was raking up the rubble that’s left of his house. He showed me his Kiev-60 camera
My first trip to Bucha was an overwhelming experience. I have never seen so much devastation with my own eyes. Street after a street of rubble. At some point I stopped photographing this. It all became the same. I printed this piece in 2023, underfixing the right part of the piece.
Pasha and Ruslan, a couple I photographed in 2023 in their temporary home in Kyiv. In 2022 they both fled the war, one from Donetsk region, other from the city of Kharkiv. I handprinted this piece in 2023. After deliberately using an exhausted fixer, this print was first covered with red spots, then later, after a few days of staying on my table, became of this cold greyish tone. In the Epitome book this picture was used in a culminating place alongside imploding flames and fires and exploding landscapes.
I was photographing nature in the Chernihiv region near Desna River in the winter of 2021, before the invasion. Later in 2022, when checking the virtual occupation map I realized, the birch wood I photographed was roughly on the same territories where Russians were stopped by AFU before being forced to withdraw.
While always interested in trying to say something in different words, I came to think of the sunflowers as crowds of people, constantly moving, looking for something, lost in frustration, etc. I hand printed this piece late, near the completion of the series. I see this long wedge of sunflowers as a huge crowd of people lining for a better life, a better future.
In the middle of working on the book, I felt I wanted to balance the milky warm grey palette with something of a different kind. That was the point when I tried to invert the cyanotypes I was experimenting with at the moment. Since the process of inverting feels natural and integral to a photography world, I was free to use it in my book. When inverted, the classic blue on white of cyanotype became the fire and flames in the black of the night. It’s something we see in the news feed to this day every day since the full-scale invasion started.