Yelena Yemchuk was 11 years old in 1981, when her family emigrated to the US from Ukraine. “I understood enough to know I’d never see anyone there again,” she writes in the short, evocative afterword to her new photobook, Odesa. “My heart broke. That was the end of my childhood.”
Yemchuk’s parents grew up in the aftermath of the second world war and lived though the Soviet era, which they assumed would also define and constrict the lives of their children if they remained in Kyiv. Ten years after they left, though, the unimaginable happened and, in the dizzying aftermath of perestroika, Ukraine declared independence. On returning there in 2003, Yemchuk travelled to Odesa for the first time and experienced at first hand the wonderful “chaos of a new nation”. She recalls going to the beach and “everywhere I looked it was like a Fellini movie – beautiful kids having a birthday party, a crazy woman walking with a pink balloon, a girl dressed as a mermaid. I had brought three rolls of film and, after five minutes, I had to run back and get more.” At that moment, she says, “my photographic language was born.”
