Description
OD Photo Prize 2025 | Runner Up
Vic Bákin [b.1984] is a self-taught photographer based in Kyiv, who has made images of Ukrainian youth for years, focusing on queer communities and subcultures. Recently, his focus has also shifted to the themes of war in Ukraine.
Artist Statement | While navigating the wounded land, I look for a glimmer of hope in people and places. I keep coming back to the same trinity that absorbed me — the soil, body, and warmth of a distant landscape. For me, uncertainty, fragility, and chaos, but also tenderness and hope, are the real essence of the series.
Epitome is a personal diary visual project created between 2021 and 2023. It is my attempt to reflect on the past and process the present events. It consists of portraits of male youth set against the backdrop of devastated landscapes that the Russian war brought to our home. Printed in my makeshift darkroom in the bathroom of my apartment in Kyiv, I combine the pictures I photographed recently in the de-occupied territories with the pictures from my archive of previous years.
Before the war, the project was centered on coming of age and youth. I was interested in transformation, from the fragility and tenderness to the inevitable onset of masculinity. Something that I lived through at some point of my life. Being one of the representatives of the queer community, I am interested in the male aspect and the notions of masculinity in Ukrainian society.
After the war started, I had this real artistic apathy like why would you even create art in the time when it comes to just surviving. To shake this feeling off, I decided to go to then-recently de-occupied territories of Kyiv region, in the spring of 2022. For year and a half, I was visiting different villages that were occupied bu russian army. I photographed landscapes, buildings, people, nature, whatever I found interesting. In the meantime I started to come back to the darkroom printing, and these new devastated landscapes little by little started to infiltrate the previous body of work that I was doing before the war. So in the process it all merged to this new body of work—which became Epitome.
All print enquiries:
tom@opendoors.gallery
+44 (0)7769922824
