The photographer captured fortitude, desperation and resolve in a city under attack.

Text by C.J. Chivers.

The Ukrainian photographer Alexander Chekmenev captured portraits of Ukrainian citizens that appear in a new photo essay.

A version of this article appears in print on March 27, 2022.

Inside Zelensky’s World.TIME’s Interview with Volodymyr Zelensky.

 The First Lady has devoted herself to helping the country cope with its traumas, both collective and personal. 

Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, 48 and 53, photographed in Kyiv.

“We try to compete to help each other. I know, when my brother is close to me, my back is covered,” Vitali says.

Alexander Chekmenev – zijn leven en werk in Oekraïne
Dialogue

In 1994, all old passports from the Soviet Union had to be changed to new Ukrainian passports. People were lining up at photo studios. 

Eine finstere Frau hält sich einen Finger an die Wange, dorthin, wo das Lächeln beginnt. Ein Mann ist mit seinen eckigen Formen einem Engel von Paul Klee irritierend ähnlich. Und ich erinnere mich plötzlich an eine Kiewer Kirche, in der Michail Wrubel am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts die zwölf Apostel nach posierenden Patienten einer Anstalt gemalt hat.

After the Soviet Union collapsed,  like all of its newly independent states, Ukraine had to go through the process of issuing new passports to all of its citizens, roughly 50 million of them.

After a photograph of the artist’s own passport and a brief introduction, the book begins with a series of headshots. These photographs are of various sizes and printed on semi-translucent paper.  The remainder of the book contains some of the most intriguing, powerful, unique, and unsettling environmental portraits...

Twenty years after the series was created, it was published as a book by the British publishing house Dewi Lewis Publishing. Bird in Flight talked to Alexander and asked photographers Donald Weber and Alexander Lyapin about their view on Passport.

After dissolving Soviet Union, the government of Ukraine ordered that USSR passports and identity documents be replaced with Ukrainian ones. Alexander Chekmenev was a young photographer working in a photo studio in the city of Luhansk, in eastern Ukraine, when he was assigned by a social aid organization to take passport pictures of the ill and elderly people who could not leave their homes.

In the National Cultural, Artistic and Museum Complex "Mystetskyi Arsenal" in the project "Ukrainian Landscape. Beyond Despair" were presented photo portraits of wounded Ukrainian soldiers who took part in the battles in the east of Ukraine, as well as portraits of civilians of the Donbass region, where the military operation took place.

Documentary photographer Alexander Chekmenev about why he photographs misfits, which photographs he never exhibits, what he learned in his one year in an ambulance and when he realized he had changed forever.

At 2014 in the Main Military Clinical Hospital, in Kyiv, where dozens of men who were injured during the war conflict in Donbass region. They are mostly Ukrainian servicemen and volunteeres.

Series portraits of protestors, called Warriors, just as they emerged from the street battles. 

 Ethnic identity and citizenship are no more clear 20 years later. The mostly Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine are embroiled in a sometimes-violent struggle between the Ukrainian government and a separatist movement.