Odesa
Yelena Yemchuk
Following the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Yelena Yemchuk spent five years travelling to Odesa to document young people volunteering to join the army. Later she began to shoot everything in Odesa.
Yelena Yemchuk (1970) born in Kyiv, Ukraine moved in her early teens to Brooklyn, New York. Her interest in photography was sparked when her dad gave her a camera for her fourteenth birthday. Most of her body of work revolves around portraiture and fashion photography.
In 2003 Yelena Yemchuk visited Odesa for the first time. Immediately she fell in love with it. She felt like she had been shown a secret place. In 1981 she had left for America with her parents. Ten years later, in 1991, the Iron Curtain dropped. Ukraine announced its independence and Yemchuk was allowed to visit. The country was in the crazy throes of growing pains and identity crisis.
For Ukrainian people, 2014 marked the start of the current conflict, when Russian-backed separatists took up arms in the Donbas region of the country, along Ukrainian’s eastern border with Russia. This followed months of protest in Kyiv agaist the pro-Russia rule of then president, Victor Yanukovych, whose use of deadly force against protesters quickly escalated the conflict. By March 2014, Putin had ordered the annexation of Crimea. In the aftermath, the Odesa Military Academy began welcoming young recruits.
Between 2015 and 2019 Yelena Yemchuk tried to capture Odesa’s bohemian, irrepressible young at a time of protests and attacks. She made her pictures in the wake of mass protetsts against pro-Russian president, Victor Yanukovych, and the first Russian separatist attacks in Donbas. They are a vivid glimpse of the vibrant youth culture in Odesa. They also capture the sense of being caught between a fragile present and an uncertain future.
The pictures are before the outbreak of the current war. In many ways Yemchuks photobook is an ode to a youthful freedom that may yet proved to be short-lived. When she started her project many young people in Odesa were joining the army in response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Many portraits in her book are of these young recruits. Now, of course, those portraits possess a poignant undertow. Maybe they are fighting in the war. Who knows what happened with them ?
Odesa
Photographer: Yelena Yemchuk
Publisher: GOST Books
Published in 2022
Hardback, 21,5 x 28,5 cm, 111 full colour images, 176 pages
Poems by Ilya Kaminsky
Jurors’ Special Mention for the 2022 Paris Photo – Aperture Photobook Awards
(Photobooks for Ukraine)