A United Ukraine, in Photographs
By James Estrin
Arthur Bondar is not exactly the type to take orders. He gave up pursuing a military career when he realized in college that “fighting was not a good way to solve problems.” Instead, he turned to photography, working for a Ukrainian photo agency.
“I worked really hard and I tried to repeat the pictures of different photographers, but I found that uninteresting,” he said. “So I started to find my own photography.”
Unfortunately, his bosses thought his “photos were too artistic” and fired him. Yet, the very day he had to return his camera gear, he learned he had won the Pikto competition and was awarded an exhibit in Canada.
Freed from having to make pictures that were mere illustrations, he started documenting the people who still lived near the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Over the next four years he made relationships, gained access — even staying in a house that was inside the excluded zone. The photos are a personal view of the nuclear disaster’s effects on nature and on people.
As he was finishing the #Chernobyl project he realized that it was just the end of a single chapter in what would become his magnum opus — a three-part study of Ukraine, which has been riven by conflict over Crimea, among other things.
“I wanted to talk about not just Chernobyl but all of the Ukraine, and so I had to photograph the whole country,” he said. “We have huge economic, environmental and political crises in #Ukraine. The war in eastern Ukraine is just a consequence of everything that has happened in the whole period of independence in Ukraine.”...
▻http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/a-united-ukraine-in-photographs/#