To me, photography felt like some mysterious force.

Introduction

In the nineteenth century, one of the principal qualities of photography was its ability to bring distant things close. It allowed the rising bourgeoisie in Europe and America to see the far-flung places of empire and trade. And in the process, it had the engagingly paradoxical effect of making these places more real while creating a romantic image of the exotic. However, following the First World War, there was a tectonic shift of social, cultural, and emotional life. The recent past was seen as functionally and ethically bankrupt and a forward-focused modernism became the order of the day. New architecture, fashion, means of transport, and social structures rapidly emerged. And, as things changed, the photographs of the previous century became invested with an aura of memory, of memorial. During the twentieth century there was a growing sense that photographs always depict times lost. So much so that by the second half of the century writers such as Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes were claiming all photographs to be harbingers of mortality.

Much of the work of the Ukrainian photographer Vic Bakin explores the nature of mortal transition – of fading and of becoming. In his early work he captured that brief period when an adolescent male reaches maturity to take on, willingly or not, the mantle of manhood. His portraits and nudes captured these moments with a gentle eye, suggesting the crosscurrents of newfound physicality and the undertow of uncertainty, of vulnerability. As his work developed he returned to consider these moments of metamorphosis from other perspectives, employing an increasingly layered language of smears and stains.

As Russia’s full-scale invasion plunged Ukraine into outright war, he began a body of work that was to become ‘Epitome’. Recently published in book form, this award-winning series is an evocation of fading memories haunted by present realities. An elegy on a coming of age overwhelmed by the coming of war, of the landscapes of youth laid waste. In contrast, his most recent portraits of young soldiers and returned prisoners of war are anchored firmly in the here and now. Yet, while these images set his previous work in a new, sharper light, he maintains his distinctively gentle and compassionate gaze.

Alasdair Foster

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© Vic Bakin – images from the unfinished series ‘Fountain of Youth’ 2015/2014

Interview

When did you begin making photographs?

It took two attempts. I got my first camera when I was nineteen. But I didn’t feel any connection and abandoned photography for five years while I was studying computer science. When I was twenty-four I moved to Kyiv. It was new and exciting in the big city. I bought a point-and-shoot and began shooting everything. To me, photography felt like some mysterious force. It sounds pretty banal, but I just wanted to capture a moment and make it last. To leave a mark…

Your early work focused on youth culture and, increasingly, on young men on the brink of adulthood. How did this begin?

After moving to Kyiv, I started to shoot model portfolios – mostly male – for fashion agencies. But very quickly, I realised that professional models have learned how to pose for the camera. It felt superficial, when what I wanted to capture was an underlying psychological state. I began to focus on young men new to the modelling business who hadn’t yet been shaped by the conventions of the fashion industry. They reminded me of my own experience of this period on the cusp of adulthood. A tumultuous phase of transformation. It’s a hard thing to capture visually…

© Vic Bakin – images from the unfinished series ‘Fountain of Youth’ 2018/2018/2019

What qualities were you looking for?

For me, this coming of age felt very contradictory – one has all these feelings all at once. I was looking for that combination of fragile tenderness and nascent manhood, the inevitable onset of masculinity that comes so fast. I was thinking of developing this work into a series called ‘Fountain of Youth’, but I was struggling to pull everything together. The portraits alone were not enough. Looking back, I feel this project was partly still born. Something was missing. But the thing with me is that I constantly try to evolve and put old material to new use. So, in that sense, ‘Fountain’ was a small step forward.

© Vic Bakin – untitled landscapes 2021

You also began to make landscape photographs that have this same timeless, melancholic quality.

I was raised in Ivano-Frankivsk, a city in the west of Ukraine that’s much smaller than Kyiv. After moving to the capital in 2009, I worked primarily as a portrait photographer. I found I could connect with the people there, but not the place itself. All those cars, power lines, traffic cones… all that visual noise. It felt intimidating. And to this day I have never really made photographs of the city.

When I travelled to the outskirts of the city and the villages beyond I felt much closer to these more natural, less pretentious places. Even though I had not visited there before, I felt more connected and able to make images. It probably arises from my love of naturalism. Here I was surrounded with living things that breathe – ancient trees, ponds, rivers, fields, weatherbeaten fences on the verge of collapse… There’s so much soul in it, as opposed to the cold concrete city.

© Vic Bakin – images from the series ‘Heavy Clouds’ 2020

In 2020, you made a body of mixed-media work called ‘Heavy Clouds’. What prompted that project?

When the pandemic lockdown began I had to stop photographing people. This made me look closer at my archives. I used to have my pictures printed at a commercial lab and over the years had ended up with stacks of cheap ten-by-fifteen-centimetre prints, including the ones from the abandoned ‘Fountain of Youth’ project.

Looking at all these pictures, I realised how much time had gone by since I made my first photos. The memory of some of those moments have stuck with me forever, like a vivid dream. But others were so vague that I barely remembered them. It was almost like I was seeing the image for the first time; as if someone else had shot it, not me. Dimly recalled fragments, partially obscured.

© Vic Bakin – images from the series ‘Heavy Clouds’ 2020

What was the significance of the white paint applied to the prints?

I thought I might give some of my old pictures a second life. At the time, I had been doing some painting – to see if I could find my ‘voice’ in a new field. Looking at the old prints, I felt I could combine the two mediums to evoke my emotional experience of absence; to recreate the blank spots that were partly obscuring my memories. It was an intuitive process. These were just cheap prints, so I tried to let my unconscious flow. It was like finding one’s way through dense cloud.

Among those pictures there were some nudes and I started to work with them. I was interested in what’s uncovered deliberately and what’s hidden unintentionally. And, in the confluence of these two mediums, whether I was revealing or concealing.

Eventually this project became a printed publication. The bookzine was published by Standard Deviation, a multidisciplinary label [working at the intersection of music, art and publishing] owned by K41, a well-known music club in Ukraine. (One of the pictures was used on the vinyl sleeve for their first release.) Later, I sold the over-painted prints, each of which was unique, one of a kind. That collection of original artworks completely sold out, bringing this chapter to a close.

[Left] © Vic Bakin ‘Borodyanka’ from the series ‘Broken Trees’ 2022
[Centre] © Vic Bakin ‘Kids, Moschun’ from the series ‘Broken Trees’ 2022
[Right] © Vic Bakin ‘Temporary Memorial, Irpin’ from the series ‘Broken Trees’ 2022

How has the Russian War impacted you personally and your creative process?

At the beginning of a full-scale invasion in 2022, besides a shock, I felt this profound creative apathy which led to a depressive state. In the face of this huge threat to Ukraine, making art felt like something very unimportant and unnecessary.

My decision to get out there and make photographs was partly in response to that sense of futility. I wanted so badly to shake off this feeling. They say if you want to reload you have to start something new. So, this journey to Kyiv region became for me my first truly documentary work when I deliberately set myself an assignment to go out there to shoot a story. Some of these photo stories were made for the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung.

© Vic Bakin – images from the series ‘Epitome’ 2023

You are best known now for your book ‘Epitome’. How did that project begin?

Around 2020–2021 I had begun a new body of work that was exploring coming-of-age through a personally nostalgic prism. With the invasion in 2022, the project’s vector changed. The war affected everything. As a response – and to understand this better – I began to photograph places that, once tranquil and uplifting, were now wounded and destroyed. For almost two years I documented the landscapes of the Kyiv region scarred by war – damaged houses, broken trees, rivers, and huge fields of marching sunflowers. I became deeply aware of how fragile we all are. Not only human beings but nature, all the living things around us.

A crystallising moment occurred in January 2022 when, while strolling through the outskirts of Kyiv, I encountered a big pile of rotting chairs. It stood there like a sculpture. I felt an immediate emotional connection. It might not have been anything special, but I was stuck by the way that this structure combined chaos with a fragile beauty.

© Vic Bakin – images from the series ‘Epitome’ 2023

What brought the figurative and landscape works together?

Russia is a threat, not only physically but existentially. With this new context, my focus on the male body took on fresh meaning. Like it or not, one reads images of young Ukrainian men differently nowadays. Because of the war. It may sound horrible but, at some level, it is as if every young male eligible to enlist has become reduced to a unit, some kind of new currency of war.

Recontextualised like this, I set my earlier images of young men on the brink of adulthood in counterpoint with landscapes scarred by war. I made those landscape photographs in the deoccupied territories of Kyiv region in 2022–2023. In this way, ‘Epitome’ – a project that began as a kind of personally invested diary – evolved to become an exploration of the notions of belonging in the aftermath of mass displacement and the chaos of war.

© Vic Bakin – images from the series ‘Epitome’ 2023

These images carry the stains and marks that can arise from incomplete processing of silver gelatin paper. How did these come about and why are they integral to the sensibility of the work?

Early on, I had used a commercial lab to process my prints. When I started to print the pictures myself, I felt this very real connection with photography. There’s nobody between the thing that I shot and the final print. Under the red safelight, the darkroom is like a womb. It’s intimate. And the process is very subjective.

I equipped my tiny bathroom as a makeshift darkroom. As the air raid sirens wailed, I began printing images, some I had made recently, some from years earlier. One problem I faced was that, in the early stage of the full-scale invasion, all of the photo shops in Kyiv closed. I had to use the same chemicals to fix my images again and again until they were exhausted. The following day I discovered that the prints were not properly fixed – the landscapes and the bodies appeared bruised with brown marks.

I’m not interested in the ‘perfect print’. I work intuitively, remaining open to surprises and accidents. These imperfections became, for me, a visual allegory… the land stained with blood.

© Vic Bakin – images from the series ‘Epitome’ 2023

Why do you call this series ‘Epitome’?

One of the meanings of epitome is an embodiment. The other is a small part or excerpt of something bigger. This Greek word somehow stuck with me from the very beginning. It came to my head when I came to think of my archive of ten years as a very diverse source of imagery. I often go through it again and again, every time unearthing something new, depending on my current mood and the things I am thinking about. It’s like a favourite movie, you find some new detail every time you watch it.

[Left] © Vic Bakin ‘Rebekah, combat medic. Kyiv’ 2024
[Right] © Vic Bakin ‘Oleksandr, a Ukrainian Marine and former POW. Kyiv’ 2024

What are you working on now?

In the two and a half years since Russia massively invaded Ukraine, everything has changed – every mind, every human being. Everything in Ukraine is now centred on the war. It is the new reality, harsh and uncertain in its perspectives; we have to deal with it; we have to embrace it somehow.

Now I want to shift my focus to those involved in today’s most important mission: defending Ukraine. Each and every one of these men and women fights for the others. Every one of them deserves to be called a hero. They are the ones who should be remembered.

These images certainly set the previous work in a new sharper light, yet you maintain such a compassionate gaze.

Yes, you have to be very gentle and caring when shooting those military portraits.

For the past two years I’ve been documenting the Ukrainian queer scene in a series of intimate portraits of queer people in their safe spaces. Now, in 2024, I am taking a similar approach to making photographs of the defenders of Ukraine.

[Left] © Vic Bakin ‘Yaroslav, infantryman at the military hospital. Kyiv’ 2024
[Right] © Vic Bakin ‘Sophia, combat medic; Echo, 3rd assault brigade member. Kyiv’ 2024

I visit them in different locations whether they are at home, in a hostel, or beside a pickup truck that is still warm from roaming the eastern roads. Most of the time they are back from rotation for a day or two, but I also photograph them in hospitals while they recuperate. Sometimes I have just fifteen minutes to make a portrait. At other times we can sit and talk for hours before we take any pictures.

There’s a notion of portraying combatants in a very distinct manner with all the bravado, ammunition, tanks, and drones. For me – as someone who is currently a civilian – all that military paraphernalia masks the real human being underneath the armour. We don’t need to invent those heroes. Just by committing themselves to this essential task, these men and women are heroes. With that being said, I want to make quiet portraits in quiet places. This not only provides space for reflection but also intensifies one’s sense of the hell that awaits these soldiers when they return to the frontline.

In making these bodies of work, what have you learned about yourself?

Two things I have recently realised about myself…

I am happy when I’m photographing. It doesn’t matter whether I am shooting a commissioned portrait of a minister, or a close friend, or somebody I just met. For me the whole process is a joy; a flow that I navigate by my own rules, on my own terms.

And looking at my earlier work, I can see it’s all there. Even ten years ago. The only difference is in the skill with which I can now articulate the thing that sits within me. Because it has always been there.

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This interview is a Talking Pictures original.

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