Wrapping up...

This is what happens in my ‘biotope’ on election day, on Sunday morning… Builders are putting up new stalls for the flowers sellers and other traders… It is almost as if someone wanted to give me a signal to wrap up and finalise my project :-)







On a more serious note, this biotope has seen a lot of changes in the last two years since I have started to photograph these underpasses and the pace of change has accelerated in the last three months when I spent more time down there… The underpasses they way I photographed them over the last two years and more intensely during this summer have all but disappeared… And no other underpass than that at Maidan, the central place in Kiev, has epitomised this change: some of the social life (esp. musicians, socialising, drinking, etc.) that took place in the underpass at Maidan has shifted to other places, some of the older traders who sold cigarettes, flowers and other everyday articles have been crowded out by flashier new stalls that now sell jewellery, mobile phones and DVDs (there is simply no physical space for them anymore: where they used to sit are now the white stalls; the same applies for the musicians, there is hardly any space for them anymore as the walls are gone), and the green walls have been ‘adorned’ with illuminated advertising or blocked up with stalls that can be locked… In a sense that vindicates my documentary project even more…





But don’t get me wrong I am not deploring this change… I am just observing. It would be awfully patronising of me to deny these people cleaner and brighter underpasses with new stores for the sake of a visually stronger environment for a hedonistic photographer… There is just a bit of melancholy creeping in on my part, as I’ll be leaving Kiev tomorrow, a town where I have spent a good part of my summer this year, a city where I made some friends and a city I fell in love with… Here is a thought: maybe I should base myself in Kiev for a few months next year to pursue other photographic projects…