Life Through Alexander Chekmenev's Camera

Alexander focuses on people who never make the headlines and receive little public attention: the elderly, the homeless, patients of psychiatric hospitals, social workers, and public activists. In this way, he emphasizes that everyone matters. His visual portraits have an accompanying narrative, which conveys the feeling that, “the drop becomes the ocean.”

In 2018-2020, Alexander worked on Deleted, a series of portraits of homeless people. The artist wanted not just to capture the faces of people who had lost their homes due to various circumstances but also to tell their stories and, most importantly, to raise awareness of them and their lives, and encourage others to support them.

After the full-scale war broke out, Alexander has been portraying Kyiv residents seeking shelter from the attacks of the Russian army. These portraits are similar in style and visual code to Deleted. The only difference is that they tell the stories of people who might lose their homes in any air raid alert. People, who are forced to seek shelter in basements, churches, and subway stations—for hours, weeks, or sometimes months—and who become temporarily homeless, caught in a moment of uncertainty and anticipation.

The background is dimmed but the portraits of ordinary Ukrainian citizens who witnessed the war in their native villages and towns are in the spotlight. The faces of people in the photographs are calm and focused, their thoughts and emotions hidden deep inside. This typology brings together portraits of people from different backgrounds, of different ages and gender; yet again, Alexander finds it crucial to tell their stories. Before creating an image, the artist spends a lot of time with the people he’s going to photograph. He talks to them, listens, and empathizes. He creates their portraits only when people are ready to be photographed. It happens when trust, communication, and a desire to share their story are all present.

ANNA MALININA, 30, a private English tutor for children, took up residence on a subway platform against her will. She woke the morning of the Russian invasion to the sounds of explosions, packed a bag and stepped outside to meet a friend. When she returned to the apartment where she lived as a boarder, the owner had fled and secured all three locks on the door. Malinina had a key for only one. The owner was unreachable. “I ended up on the street,” she said. Each day, Malinina has left the subway station for about 30 minutes. Most everything
nearby is closed, she said, but one store has food, and she goes there. The platform has been cold at night — “very, very cold,” she said, “almost like being outside.” On March 16, with Kyiv on all-day lockdown, Malinina was not allowed to step above ground at all. “People have been down here for days,” she said not long after nightfall.

ROMAN KRYVYTSKY, 38, owns Fighter, a martial-arts club in Kyiv, where he teaches karate to about 200 students. He joined the Territorial Defense Forces on the day Russia’s battalions crossed Ukraine’s borders. Kryvytsky had no experience with infantry weapons but participated in the bloody street clashes for the Maidan in 2014, fights that involved Molotov cocktails and studded clubs. The Ukrainian military assigned him to an antitank team, which a British instructor has been teaching what he called the “nuances” of using NLAWs — shoulder-fired missiles with armor-piercing warheads that have been destroying tanks on the war’s many fronts. “We have been training to use it for the past two weeks,” Kryvytsky said. “Russian columns will not survive attempts to enter Kyiv,” he said. When the fighting is over, he expects to resume his former life. “I intend to get married and have children,” he said. “I have plans.”

Early in the Russian assault on Kyiv, a bomb landed on a car parked beside the apartment building where NATALIA DOLINSKA lived. Shrapnel and fire destroyed seven vehicles. Dolinska, 35, the director of a branch office of a financial company, was spared; she had relocated ahead of the attack. Her company closed its doors as Russia invaded, leaving her with no place to be each day. So she joined a field kitchen and now works shifts with other volunteers to gather groceries or prepare food; the flames behind her in this portrait are from the open-air stoves that now feed thousands of neighbours. With her home nearly destroyed, her job idled and Russian forces seemingly trying to encircle the capital, Dolinska spoke with disgust at Kremlin propaganda that insisted that the Russian Army came to save Ukraine. “Russia,” she said, had not invaded to help. “We do not need saving,” she said. We were doing fine without you.”

SVITLAVA PETROVSKA, 86, is a living archive of Ukrainian suffering and resilience. Born in 1935, she fled to Russia with her family as German soldiers advanced on Kyiv during World War II; her relatives who stayed behind were killed. Petrovska had measles and pneumonia as a young refugee. Russian women in a village, she said, nursed her to health. She returned to Kyiv late in the war, still a child, and helped clear its rubble. As a young  woman, she became a history teacher, and she taught for 63 years. When Russia began bombarding Kyiv in February, she moved into the subway and remained sheltered there almost continuously — her most sensible option, she said, given that she walks very slowly and could not move from home to shelter between attacks. Late in the second week, with the Russian Army grinding closer, she left Kyiv for Budapest, her life bookended by attacks on her home. “I have seen a lot, and I have never seen anything like this,” she said on the phone as she crossed the border, a refugee once more.

The war with Russia divided the family of VALERIA GANICH, 58, before the latest invasion. Her older daughter lives in Donetsk where Kremlin-backed separatists have been fighting since 2014, and consumes and believes Russian state media. Her daughter is not a Putinist, Ganich said, but supports Russia and does not think the war has been happening as her mother experiences it. “It’s just brainwashing,” Ganich said. “She does not understand.” Ganich herself was born in Russia, in the city of Ufa, but has long lived in Ukraine where she works as a supermarket cashier and has been writing screenplays. She has a heart condition and feels too weak to go back and forth to her apartment when air-raid sirens sound, so she has been living in a subway station for weeks. Driven underground, she spoke of the invading army with disgust. “They are inhuman,” she said. “This is not how people behave.” She referred darkly to Western militaries, too. “NATO,” she said, “is hiding behind the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians.”

TARAS KOBLIUK, 33, and NINA SAVENKO, 33, husband and wife, are artists who work together as lithographers. When the war began, they had money saved and felt healthy. They decided, Savenko said, “to use our strength to help our city.” The couple evacuated Maia, their 7-year-old daughter, with her grandparents to Lviv, in Ukraine’s west. Then they became part of a group that gathers and delivers medicine by bicycle and car. Long lines grew at pharmacies, and supplies of certain drugs ran low. “We spent two days trying to find the necessary medicine for a child with epilepsy,” Kobliuk said. By day, Savenko and Kobliuk work outside and move throughout Kyiv, risking being caught in an airstrike or an artillery or rocket attack. At night, they sleep in a small tent in a subterranean parking garage. At first, they lived two levels below ground. Then they moved up one level, closer to the ordnance and the air. “We are becoming braver,” Savenko said.