About the Works

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became necessary in the newly independent Ukraine to replace old Soviet passports with new Ukrainian ones. There was a rush to accomplish this in the shortest possible time. All Ukrainians had to get a new passport within a year. In 1994, the social services of Lugansk, a town in southeast Ukraine, started offering photographers the job of shooting passport photos in the homes of the elderly and ill citizens, who could not pay a photographer on their own. I was one of the photographers commissioned by the social services to go door to door during this national passportization campaign. This is how I ended up in the homes of these people, along with the social workers whose job was to provide free medicine and groceries. When I saw how people were living out the final years of their lives, it made a very strong impression on me. I remember a blind woman. I did not know she was blind, so I asked her to look into the camera, but she said she could not see. I thought, why would a blind person need a passport? She did not have too much time left anyway. There was one day when I took pictures of nearly 60 people, mostly old folks, obviously. The next day, when I was handing out the shots, I found out that one of these old guys had just died.