Oleksander Glyadyelov
Untitled, from the War series, 2022
About the Works
These photos were taken by Oleksandr Glyadelov during the first weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It is a continuation of the work he started in Donbas, where he was shooting from 2014–2020. This time he turns his lens on the civilians trying to escape the disasters of war. The backdrop is the once flourishing, vibrant, and contemporary European megapolis of Kyiv and its suburbs. The photographer deals with the presentation of highly charged content and documents the state of affairs in Ukraine with the sensibility of an analog camera that takes no chances. Glyadelov claims that there is no distance between himself and the photographed subject, which makes his task close to impossible as he often observes matters of life and death, the implausible ferocity of the Russian troops towards civilians, and the scorched earth they leave behind.
Kateryna Filyuk
About the Artist
Oleksandr Glyadyelov is a Ukrainian documentary photographer and photojournalist, born in 1956 in the Polish town of Legnica. In 1974 he moved with his family to Kyiv, where he studied optics and instrumentation at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. As a photographer, he has covered military conflicts in Moldova, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Ukraine. Since 1997 he has actively cooperated with the international humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) and other international organisations such as HRW, The Global Fund, UNAIDS, UNICEF. His work addresses social issues: military conflicts, humanitarian crises, child homelessness, prisons, HIV / AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis C epidemics, and drug addiction. He deliberately photographs with an analog camera on black-and-white film and prints his photos at his home laboratory in Kyiv. Glyadyelov is also a teacher at Ukrainian Photo Schools Victor Marushchenko School of Photography and Bird in Flight. Among his numerous awards and honours are: Ukrpressphoto-97 Grand Prix for his series Abandoned Children; Hasselblad Prize at the European Photography Competition in Vevey, Switzerland, Images ‘98; Mother Jones 2001 Medal of Excellence of the International Documentary Photography Foundation in San Francisco, USA; Moving Walls 2002 of the Open Society Institute (OSI) in New York, USA. He was also the winner of the Shevchenko Prize 2020 for the photo project Carousel. Glyadyelov lives and works in Kyiv.
