Survivors in Ukraine

Description

A powerful and haunting visual record, Stephen Shore’s portraits highlight the resilience and hope of Ukraine’s Holocaust survivors.

Stephen Shore, one of the most influential photographers living today, traveled to the Ukraine in 2012 and again in 2013, just prior to the current political upheaval, to visit 35 survivors, most of whom are women. In the photographs of the survivors and their homes, Shore visually explores their collective experience as seen through quotidian details, and leaves open the question as to how the history of the Holocaust informs the viewer’s reception of the portraits.

The book’s 200 digital color photographs are organized to create intimate portraits of their individual and collective experiences whilst maintaining the unsentimental formal order of his photography.

An essay by Jane Kramer, who has written The New Yorker’s Letter from Europe since 1981, will situate the survivors and their stories in the historical context of Ukraine’s modern history with a particular emphasis in the place of Jews within that history.

An important cultural document, Survivors in Ukraine sits between the traditions of the diaristic colour photobook that Shore himself pioneered with Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (2005), and that of the ‘concerned’ photographer using the camera as witness to conflict and other historic events.

Stephen Shore is one of the most influential photographers living today. His photographs from the 1970s, taken as he embarked on road trips across America, established him as a pioneer in the use of colour in art photography. His capturing of the minutiae of life, the seemingly unimportant, and doing so – radically – in colour, singled him out from the traditional documentary photographers of the everyday. He has influenced generations of photographers – from Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, to Nan Goldin and Wolfgang Tillmans. He has been director of the Photography Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, since 1982.

In 1971 Shore became the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His photographs have since been included in many exhibitions, including the Tate Modern’s first exhibition of photography ‘Cruel and Tender’ in 2003. His work has been collected by museums around the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Shore’s published photobooks include Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, American Surfaces, A Road Trip Journal and the print-on-demand The Book of Books. Shore has also written a primer on the visual function of photographs, The Nature of Photographs. In 2013, Phaidon published A New York Minute, Shore’s first iBook.

“Survivors in Ukraine is an unconventional but potent documentation of Holocaust survivors in their twilight years.” —TruthDig

“As a recorder of the fleeting but highly charged moments in the everyday, the weight of Shore’s influence is undeniable.” —Creative Review on Stephen Shore

“[Shore’s] exquisitely composed colour photographs became the benchmark for documenting our consumer-driven, fast-living world.” —Lexus magazine on Stephen Shore

“Shore invites readers to explore a nostalgic yet fresh observation of a moment in history… [and] with his talent for composition and colour, unites the shades of life’s histories into a depiction of endurance and humility” —Aesthetica

“Survivors In Ukraine merges landscape, observation and portraiture. Its evocation of a place and its people is made all the more powerful by the history – and the personal stories of survival – that haunt the images. …For all the weight of history that attends the project, it is a quiet book. It brims with telling details… [Shore’s] quietly observational images speak not just of survival, but of an extraordinary individual and collective resilience” —The Guardian

“I’ve the utmost respect for photographers and storytellers who dedicate years of their lives to one subject and give us in-depth insights into world’s we’d otherwise know very little about.”—Elena Heatherwick, Elle

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