Why these unsettling '90s Ukrainian passport photos are more relevant than ever

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In a newly independent Ukraine in the mid '90s, photographer Alexander Chekmenev took on a strange assignment when he was tasked with taking the passport photos of some of the country's elderly and most vulnerable.

during the mid-1990s, an elderly woman casts her eyes away from the camera, her mouth pursed with tension. Another woman, gray hair braided across her head, holds the subject's face firmly, one hand cupping her jaw, the other behind her neck. A white backdrop is up by someone just out of frame. A sense of unease and strangeness fills the composition.in a referendum, photographer Alexander Chekmenev took many photos like these, of people in their homes, in the eastern city of Luhansk.

Those residents had lived through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, and were left forgotten in its collapse, according to the photographer. "The limited frame of a passport photo is like a TV box in Soviet times: propaganda of a happy lifestyle within the allowed limits," Chekmenev said from Kyiv, where he is based, in an email interview translated from Russian."Behind the corners of the passport and behind the square of a white background, the true reality, without retouching and censorship, was hidden."Many of the residents were unwilling to have their images taken, and some were near death.

Altogether, Chekmenev took several hundred passport photos, as well as 36 color behind-the-scenes images for posterity. In 2017, he published them as a book, titled"Passport," with Dewi Lewis Publishing in London.

 

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