The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Odesa before the bombshells
In the 2000s, I lived in a seedy quarter of Ukraine’s half-wild port, where the courtyards rang with laughter. These magical photographs bring it all back
Irecall the Poppy brand matches, sunbathing on Soviet concrete, gaudy clothes bought at the Seventh-Kilometre Market. I remember the boys being sallowskinned; the girls, killingly defiant – and everyone being very young or very old, with hardly any middle age between.
In the early 2000s, when I lived in Moldavanka, the old Jewish and criminal quarter of Odesa, the Ukrainian city felt exactly as it does in a new book of Yelena Yemchuk’s transporting photographs: wild, secret, half-dreaming, magical. I was just married, with a baby son, to a beautiful Odesan woman.
The boss of the Crimean mafia had been at our engagement party: he played guitar, sang folk songs and gave us a gold lighter. Only such men were wealthy back then, if they didn’t get shot or imprisoned.
In those days, after Communism had fizzled out and Ukraine declared independence, Odesa was a dusty Sleeping Beauty being kissed awake by a guy in a blackedout Mercedes with a handgun in the glovebox. But Yemchuk’s images of ordinary citizens, especially of Odesa’s youth, catch something richer: their lives, a mixture of surrealism and improvisation, their will to survive, their love of performance, their wit – all born of a city “built by immigrants for immigrants”, in the words of local poet Ilya Kaminsky.
Yemchuk grew up in Kyiv, 500km to the north, but became fascinated by Odesa’s reputation for both easygoing acceptance and danger. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, she went to Odesa to photograph the 16and 17-year-old cadets at the city’s Military Academy. Feeling that their faces needed context, she also gives us the raw city: Soviet brutalism; wide-eyed children as skinny as birch twigs; teenage dancers in home-made sequined outfits; lovers with nowhere to go; chess tables on the beach; self-drawn tattoos; the urgency of dancing and, sometimes, oblivion.
The solemnity of Yemchuk’s portraits is striking. In Odesa, people don’t smile for the camera, though they will laugh if your uncle fell asleep drunk in the snow and had to have his toes amputated. Laughter is how you deal with misfortune. In the new book, Odesa, the photographs are accompanied with occasional poems by Kaminsky. In one, “In Praise of Laughter”, he writes that his “grandfather… ran after a train with tomatoes in his coat / and
A Crimean mafia boss played guitar and sang folk songs at our engagement party
danced naked on the table in front of our house –/ he was shot…”
Innocence jumps sharply from the faces of Yemchuk’s subjects. In one portrait a dancer poses gravely, her moment stolen by a cheeky younger girl grinning as she performs an acrobatic handstand behind her. But their youthful bodies are marked by tattoos or scars. In another image, a naked girl reclines in wild grassland, an unfinished apartment block behind her. A thin pink line runs from her throat to her belly button.
To live in Odesa is to step through the back of the wardrobe into a magical realm that is not without hazard.
As I write this, a family member texts from the city that despite the Russian missiles that have been falling for the past three days, in the courtyards of Moldavanka they are still drinking, singing and dancing. Yemchuk’s photographs are like that. Look again. You will see something alive that you hadn’t seen before: a glimpse of the city’s soul.
‘Odesa’ by Yelena Yemchuk (with poems by Ilya Kaminsky) is published by GOST at £45. Twenty per cent of proceeds from sales or pre-orders of the book purchased directly from gostbooks.com will be donated to the charity Monstrov in Odesa