In images made before the Russian invasion in 2022, three photographers preserve social memory—and witness a nation striving to define its sovereignty.
Working in black and white with one camera, Chekmenev took the official passport-format headshots of weary visages against a portable white backdrop; while using a wide-angle camera with color film, he captured all that lay beyond in photographs that would eventually form the series Passport (1995). “I saw that the frame needed to be widened,” he told me recently. The photographs represent a people entrenched in an old Soviet system that cared little for, deceived, and effectively abandoned the individual. Depicting a generation trapped in time, the pictures teeter on the precipice of uncertainty.
Alexander Chekmenev’s national and ethnic identities have whipsawed during the upheavals since the collapse of the Soviet Union and right through the current crisis.
Alexander Chekmenev began his mandatory military service in 1988 as a Russian citizen of the Soviet Union from eastern Ukraine’s Donbass region. By the time he left the army two years later – and after the collapse of the Soviet Union — he was an ethnic Russian and Ukrainian citizen.
