How to love each other when you come from two camps that have become enemies? To this eternal and tragic question, photographer Oksana Yushko tries to answer in her own way. In his project titled Family, Launched in 2014, the year of the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in the Donbass, she photographs Ukrainian-Russian couples. Previously, the situation was so common that we did not even speak of “mixed couples”. These love stories about the territories that made up the USSR were legion: the borders were porous, fluid, barely existing.
One Soviet family
Hadn’t it been said and repeated for decades that these men and women formed a single family? “During the Soviet era, people traveled from one region of the USSR to another for a thousand reasons – studies, work, vacations, various visits, recalls the 48-year-old photographer. Our history is complex and intertwined. Millions of Ukrainians – ditto for Russians – have family and friends across the border. »
“My idea was very simple: (…) talk about humanity, our common past and our possible future. » Oksana Yushko
Oksana Yushko is herself the child of one of these couples: her father is Ukrainian, her mother Russian. She grew up in Ukraine before moving to Russia twenty-five years ago. The portrait of his parents, Lina and Viktor, in their living room in Kharkiv, a thirty-minute drive from the Russian border, is the first in his series. Oksana, of Russian nationality since she moved to Moscow, lives in a relationship with Arthur, a Ukrainian. These long banal loves have become fault lines. The couples who posed for her, Oksana Yushko calls them her “hero”.
For years, the artist, whose work has been honored at Arles Photography Encounters and to Meetings of the Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for War Correspondents, questions armed conflicts, memories and intimate traumas. When she started this work, almost nine years ago, the war in the Donbass was setting in.
“Friends ceased to be friends, neighbors became enemies, families were torn apart. Politics broke into people’s lives, does she remember. My idea was very simple: to reduce the aggressiveness between people who were not directly involved in the conflict, to talk about humanity, our common past and our possible future. » Oksana Yushko posts her first images on social networks. Many couples write to him to participate. She is invited into homes and travels from the far west of Ukraine to the far east of Russia.
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