Series

Daily Lives

Started as documentation of life in cramped rooms of Ukrainian student dormitories, the project turned into a research of the interaction of people sharing a common space: an apartment, room, bed. I asked my friends and lovers for permission to become an inconspicuous observer of their daily lives. Some of them lived at my place; some couples invited me to their home. Thus, for several years, I dived into the atmosphere of someone else’s private space, someone’s story and captured “how do we live together”.

#chekachkov  #daily  #igor  #lives

Sleep

For quite a while I have been photographing how I sleep with my partner, pondering if my camera can catch the chemistry that happens between two people dreaming side by side. Every night I open the shutter when we go to bed and close it when we wake up, wondering what will be displayed on the photo that captured 8 hours of our unconscious existence.

NA4JOPM8

When my hard drive collapsed I lost a decade of photographs. After hard drive recovery I found my photographs corrupted, half greyed out, or glitched; a lot of photos swapped parts thus creating accidental collages. I started to look through these images, trying to reevaluate my past and reconcile myself to the loss. This lead to a series, which mixes Ukrainian politics, my intimate life, and photography assignments, revealing unexpected meanings and connections. The more photographs I found, the more I was fascinated by this idea of error, which reflects Ukrainian reality much more precise, then “clean” image itself.

Obscure Land

This series continues my exploration of how modern digital technology affects images. Shooting Ukrainian landscapes in panorama mode, I observe how reality is glued together by an in-camera algorithm, and how, when glued, it crumbles to pieces. On the one hand, I am interested in how a modern camera depicts time and space, and how plausibly it models the reality around us. On the other hand, this is an attempt to describe the Ukrainian reality using the errors of algorithms.

Obscure Land pt2

This series continues my exploration of how modern digital technology affects images. Shooting Ukrainian landscapes in panorama mode, I observe how reality is glued together by an in-camera algorithm, and how, when glued, it crumbles to pieces. On the one hand, I am interested in how a modern camera depicts time and space, and how plausibly it models the reality around us. On the other hand, this is an attempt to describe the Ukrainian reality using the errors of algorithms.

Daily Lives of the Displaced

10 years ago I started my “Daily Life” series, documenting how people share a common space. Today I continue to take photographs of people who was forced to leave their home because of russian invasion to Ukraine and now share the space with people who…