Book Review | "Bolnichka" by Vladyslav Krasnoshchok

At first glance, the binding, which is bound with what appears to be handmade medical (?) tape, draws you in, and when you open the book, you are greeted by photographs with a texture that is by no means clear, unlike the blurry Japanese style. The photographs were taken in a hospital somewhere, and the cover seems to have been designed with these contents in mind. At the time, I did not know the details of the work, but it made such an impression on me that I contacted the publisher after returning to Japan.



Vladislava Krasnoshchuk studied medicine at Kharkiv Medical University from 1997 to 2002, and began taking photographs in 2008. Since 2010, she has worked as a maxillofacial surgeon at Kharkiv National Emergency Hospital, and during the same time, she has been working as a photographer at theShilo Group" and began his activities as a member of the group.

The Shilo Group is a group of photographers from the Kharkiv School, consisting of photographer Serhiy Lebedinsky, who is also the director of the Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography (MOKSOP), along with Vadim Trikozan and Oleksiy Sobolev. They focus on social issues in Ukraine, primarily the legacy of the Soviet past, and have produced challenging photographic works that update previous works from the Kharkiv School. In particular, the group has produced a work/photobook entitled "The 1990s: A History of Ukraine," which was shot over several days at Independence Square during the protest demonstrations that took place in Kyiv in January 2014.Euromaidan" is considered one of the most important works in the recent history of photography.

The book "Bolnichka" features photographs taken between 2010 and 2018 at the hospital where Krasnoshchok worked for over 10 years, as well as various anecdotes from his time there.

At first, he photographed his colleagues, but gradually the patients themselves began asking him to take their photos, and Krasnoshchuk began to photograph them, sometimes even posing and making expressions that resembled those of a sick person for the camera. Combined with the texture of the photographs, fiction and reality coexist as equal parts.

The characteristic colours in the photograph areThis is made using a printing technique called "lithprint."Lithprints are prints made by overexposing photographic paper in the darkroom and then developing it in a thin developer. Shilo Group frequently uses this technique as one of their strategies to redefine the expression of black and white photography in the Kharkiv School, and they use Soviet-made photographic paper, which is a relic of the past.

The stronger the expressive aspect, the more likely it is that the subject will be violently subordinated to the artist's "worldview." However, in this work, despite the use of impressive techniques throughout that are in keeping with the "Shilo Group," the subject's subjective behavior disrupts the work, allowing for a multifaceted interpretation that goes beyond being a simple social documentary.

This work was subsequently nominated for the Photo Book Award at the Arles International Photography Festival in 2024. Please take a look at this work as a work that captures the harsh environment after the collapse of the Soviet Union, as a doctor's daily diary, and as a result of action and exploration towards the previous generation of the Kharkiv School.

Title: Bolnichka
Artist: Vladislav Krasnoshchok
MOKSOP, 2023
Hardcover
200 x 180 mm
120 pages
Text in Ukrainian and English
First edition of 600 copies
ISBN: 978-3-947-922-03-1
¥9,460 -
https://www.iack.online/collections/kharkiv-school-of-photography/products/bolnichka-by-vladyslav-krasnoshchok

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