Heartfelt documentation of a traditional Ukrainian ritual heralding the arrival of spring: a startlingly personal project from the photographer and film director known for her work with the Smashing Pumpkins
Pbk, 7.25 x 10 in. / 176 pgs / 121 color. | 3/5/2024 | In stock $60.00
Clic Gallery hosted a book signing reception on Wednesday, March 2nd with Ukranian born photographer Yelena Yemchuk, left, whose new book Gidropark is published by Damiani. Yemchuk is highly regarded for her fashion work, but her first book focuses on a more personal project - portraits of sunbathers and picnickers at a public park in Kiev. read the full post
Published by Edition Patrick Frey. Text by Ioana Pelehatăi.
This is the sixth photobook by Ukrainian American visual artist Yelena Yemchuk (born 1970). Born in Kyiv but based in the United States, Yemchuk makes images that teeter on the threshold between her Eastern European heritage and her daily life in New York; between fiction and reality; between the grand beauty of 1960s cinema and the social and built environments of post-Soviet realms. Through Yemchuk’s gaze, spaces blur to create dreamscapes and metamorphoses. As with all of her work, Malanka is a personal, feminine, surrealist and magical project. The eponymous tradition is a pre-Christian folklore ritual driving out winter and welcoming spring, an ancient custom reminiscent of Persephone’s return in Greek mythology. It is celebrated on January 14, the old New Year in the Julian calendar, by ethnic Romanians in western Ukraine. In 2019 and 2020, Yemchuk traveled to Crasna (Krasnoilsk in Ukrainian) to document the night-long festival. The book includes a poetic essay by Romanian cultural journalist Ioana Pelehat?i.
Ukrainian-born, Brooklyn-based photographer and painter Yelena Yemchuk is most commonly known for her fashion and portrait photographs, which have appeared in Italian and Japanese Vogue, V, the New Yorker and The New York Times. Yet her personal work, which she usually shoots on a 35-mm camera while traveling around the globe, has rarely been seen. The photographs in this book were taken over three summers between 2005 and 2008 at Gidropark, an old amusement park (Yemchuk has called it "an Eastern European version of Coney Island") in Kiev that she often visited when she was growing up. Amid the park's beaches, sports grounds and woodlands, leisure becomes curiously otherworldly, with picnicking families stripped down to their bathing suits (or even less) taking on a Fellini-esque quality in Yemchuk's wistful shots.
Yelena Yemchuk: Gidropark