Charoite Land

Charoite Land

Charoite Land is a deeply intimate series dedicated to my grandmother and grandfather, who died in 2025. The project emerged from my personal experience of saying goodbye to two people who were an important part of my life. Through photography, I tried to remain close to them during their quiet departure — to observe, record, and preserve the fragile presence of people who were gradually leaving this world.

The series combines portraits of my grandparents with images of death, disappearance, and transformation. A dead tree, the carcass of an animal found in the de-occupied territories, a medieval Italian town — these images are not direct illustrations of death, but rather its distant echoes. They speak of what remains after life has withdrawn: a body, a landscape, a city, a trace. The medieval town appears monumental and almost timeless, yet at the same time strangely lifeless — like a fossilized leaf, something that once contained life but has now become its memory.

At the end of the series, I return to two portraits of my grandparents that I made in 2024, a year before their deaths. Originally vivid and colourful, I transformed these images after their passing into a dark, almost nocturnal palette and overlaid them with constellations. This gesture became an act of remembrance and tribute. The human figures gradually disappear into the darkness, while the constellations suggest another form of presence — one that exists beyond the visible body. We look at the stars, perhaps without realizing that one day we, too, will become part of the darkness we are looking into.

The series concludes with an abstract image of an almost vanished river in my native Kharkiv. The river is gradually being overtaken by reeds, until it becomes impossible to distinguish where the water ends and the vegetation begins. The image becomes almost a mirror — a surface in which stars seem to flicker, where what is still present meets what has already disappeared.