YELENA YEMCHUK

Gidropark, from Yelena Yemchuk, is a celebration of the successful marriage of content and form, a foray into naturalism from a photographer whose high-fashion editorials are staples of a much glossier industry. The images, black-and-white 35 mm prints, bring us from the bright lights of her work in Vogue, i-D, and Another to a recreational complex in Kiev, Ukraine, where pages of dark hair and tangled grass stir a complex reaction in the Western reader. The standard relief is there—children asleep across acres of sand, a woman drifting through a soft wake, families paddling out to sea—but subtle signs of gloom sneak in from the horizon: deflated rafts and crumbling auditoriums, picnics atop discarded planks, heavy artillery strung from tree to tree.

The publication, particularly to those familiar with her work, has the air of autobiography, a cultural study written with the pen of a Ukrainian expat who moved to the United States at eleven years old. Her artistry, with this in mind, has the feel of a collaboration between intuition and high education refinement, natural skill with influence from Parsons School of Design and Art Center in Pasadena. In some work, like her Vera Wang and Kenzo campaigns, the latter shines through, not a detail lost to technical shortcomings; in her more arresting editorials, gauntness and shadows suggest inner stirrings of a different sort—that in reality, high price points are not the end-all and cure to surrounding disorder.

In Gidropark, her first book, we see this talent in the consciousness and vision of a photographer subject to a place no longer her home, aware of starkness even in a facility designed for escape. The cover image itself features a young couple in embrace, heavy eyes and smiles toward the camera, but their bodies are bent out of shape, awkward in disproportion, as though the lens itself is an unexpected outlet to the wider world. The merit, though, is not in the documentation of young love or the post-war disarray stretching grey across the horizon, but awareness on the part of Yemchuk that this life and view, in many ways, were almost hers. And what that awareness suggests, of course, is that, in many ways, they are.

Yelena Yemchuk’s Gidropark is out now from Damiani.

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