PDN - August 2011

EXPOSURES

PARK LIFE

continued from page 108

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6/10/11 4:25: 31 PM

Though she didn’t intend it, Yemchuk feels her Gidropark
work provides a counter-narrative to the primarily negative
imagery depicting life in the old Soviet bloc.

The book’s cover shows a young couple embracing while they stand ankle-deep in the Dniepar River in their bathing suits. Behind them on the horizon are several high-rise buildings, including one with four shining domes. In a picture of a group of people wading at the river’s edge, a little girl smiles for the camera, but she’s wearing fake vampire teeth. In a photograph of a group of older men gathered around a chessboard set up on a tree stump, a young man in the background does a handstand on a set of metal posts, his legs splayed acrobatically in a V shape. In another image a young girl sits on a bench at an outdoor gymnasium. A boy’s legs dangle into the top right of the frame, and we wonder for a moment if he has been hanged before we realize he’s simply hanging from a high bar.

Though some of the young girls she photographed would strike poses, most of the people were very natural around the camera, Yemchuk notes. People were open with her and she felt connected to them. The pictures “became empowering,” she says, a counterpoint to “a lot of the work that has been coming out of the [old] Soviet bloc [which] has not necessarily been very optimistic. That is not to say that the pictures are not dark in a sense or don’t have dark humor to them, but I felt like the characters in the photographs were very strong and very real, and that was very important to me because I really love it there and I wanted to capture the beauty of it.”