Ukraina Pasport

A passport is an object you use to cross borders, and this work is about living on an edge. These photographs were made in Ukraine shortly before the civil unrest that led to the 2013 protests and the ongoing war in the Donbass region. The work is an attempt to address poetically the symptoms of social tension that the photographer observed in the country at the time, by means of an imagery that shuns the rhetoric of journalism or propaganda in favour of a more intimate, subjective, and sometimes humorous tone. The surreal place that is evoked by these pictures is one suspended between stereotypes of the East and the West, between Soviet nostalgia and the promises of consumerism, between reality and imagination.