Traveling Model (Riso Zine Published by Editions Bessard)

Photography, Zine

This project happened as a coincidence, and it was actually never my intention; it just emerged out of itself when I looked back at my archive and realized that I had photographed many Ukrainian traveling models in the past months. I started to wonder why. The connection between us was instant, I felt we were a perfect match because these women embodied this mesmerizing mixture of power and vulnerability, some kind of truth that I tend to search for in people. 

Although they are always in motion, moving places, our paths have crossed. I used my camera to peer into their glowing, restless souls, pressing it up against the charged aesthetics of erotica, where their bodies stopped being forms and became portals. Untamed, insistent, and untethered. In the book, I combined their portraits with landscapes from my homeland, as a form of a mutual meeting point, an understanding, or perhaps a departure.

I don’t know what will happen tomorrow…

*
My comets
and their melange of vulnerability and fire
I became their magnet
attracting them to unleash something that deep down needed to be done
meetings that were meant to happen
I have within me the touch and the silence that trembles
I feel those tears
those waters that are alone
they die with a smile under my eyelid
in the rapids of duvets and translucent dreams
I am a killer of seconds
and I jump through the portal of my camera
trespassing endless shores full of tenderness

*
One drink
that turned me into a sex slave
meth labs
we were like Bonnie and Clyde, she said
I know what is happening now
they killed him
varenyky, where the sour cream
gets really sour,
making my mouth go inward
something smells off
maybe it’s the explosions
maybe it’s my volatile state

*
It’s dawn and models are sleeping on trains
carrying themselves in their luggage
wishing you could see them in color
but beauty is always monochrome in a man’s eyes
their bodies hide traces, yet they shimmer
and then everything beautiful in them fades away
they are dancing with their body only,
and they are trying to set themselves on fire
perhaps, it’s vertigo
perhaps, it’s displacement
an immense desire to fall
sulfurous spirit
cold as ice
radicalization of bodies
and their ability to freeze air

Thank you, Diana, Kate, Ksenia, Olivia, and Yulia, for unleashing the fire within yourselves and making me feel your warmth.