I couldn’t give any other answer to the situation happening in Ukraine except for this one. The feeling that I was missing something very important, which I had since the beginning of the protests in Kiev, made me come and look at the Maidan with my own eyes. This place had a unique quality – being there, you could find what you were looking for. Nationalists, or so called “banderovtsi”, making the coup d’etat attempt, or a new generation of Ukrainians, rose against the lawlessness of the government.
I was born in the USSR. Ukraine became independent when I entered schooling. The Dusk of the ninetieth, the social fall, ended with the “stability” of the two thousandth. The bottom was reached and the “Night” came. The Night mixed the soviet past and uncertain present, the people became socially passive. I started to photograph Night in Kharkiv, in the east Ukraine a few years ago. Photographs I made visually fell out from the context of the time; they left the feeling of something already seen in the past. This apparent repeat of the history showed the present time in a surrealistic way. The research I make by means of photography has a goal – I’m looking for the self-identification, I was looking for my homeland.
At Maidan I found what I was after – hundreds of thousands Ukrainian people looking for the Dawn.
Bio
Sergiy Lebedynskyy was born in 1982 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In 2010 he collaborated Vladyslav Krasnoshok and Vadym Trykoz and founded the photographic group “Shilo”, continuing traditions of the Kharkiv School of Photography (Boris Mikhailov, Evgeny Pavlov, Juri Rupin etc.), known by its bold and critical view on the social processes in ex-USSR. He holds a PhD. in engineering and works as a freelance photographer.
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Sergiy Lebedynskyy
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