Book Review: "Bolnichka" by Vladyslav Krasnoshchok

While visiting Polycopies, the photobook fair held in Paris last year, I came across a book at one of the booths that immediately caught my eye.

Drawn in by its binding — finished with what appears to be medical(?) tape, so that at first glance it could be a handmade book — I opened it to find photographs of a decidedly unsharp texture, different again from the Japanese are-bure-boke. The photographs had been taken in a hospital somewhere, and the cover seems to have been designed with this content in mind. I knew nothing about the work at that point, but it stayed with me, and after returning to Japan I contacted the publisher.

Vladyslav Krasnoshchok studied medicine at Kharkiv Medical University from 1997 to 2002, and began taking photographs in 2008. From 2010 he has worked as a maxillofacial surgeon at the Kharkiv emergency hospital, and around the same time began his activities as a member of the “Shilo Group”.

The Shilo Group is a collective of Kharkiv School photographers formed by Sergiy Lebedynskyy — photographer and director of the Museum of the Kharkiv School of Photography (MOKSOP) — together with Vadym Trykoz and Oleksiy Sobolev. Focusing on Ukraine’s social issues, above all the legacy of the Soviet past, the group presents challenging photographic works that update the tradition of the Kharkiv School. Among them, Euromaidan — shot over several days in Independence Square during the protests that broke out in Kyiv in January 2014 — is counted among the most important photographic works of recent years.

Bolnichka brings together photographs taken between 2010 and 2018 at the hospital where Krasnoshchok worked for more than a decade, along with various episodes from his time on duty.

At first he photographed his colleagues, but before long patients began asking to have their pictures taken, and Krasnoshchok also started photographing them as they performed sick-looking poses and expressions for the camera. Combined with the texture of the photographs, fiction and reality mingle here as equals.

The distinctive tonality of the photographs comes from a printing technique known as lith printing — prints made by over-exposing the photographic paper in the darkroom and developing it in a diluted developer. The Shilo Group frequently uses this technique as one of its strategies for redefining the monochrome expression of the Kharkiv School, printing on Soviet-made photographic paper that has itself become a relic of the past.

The stronger a work’s expressive dimension, the more often its subjects end up violently subordinated to the author’s “worldview”. In this work, however — even though the striking technique inherited from the Shilo Group runs throughout — the subjects’ own active behaviour disturbs the work, opening it to multiple readings that go beyond mere social documentary.

The book was later shortlisted for the book award at Les Rencontres d’Arles 2024. As a record of the harsh environment that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, as a doctor’s everyday diary, and as the outcome of an action and inquiry addressed to the preceding generations of the Kharkiv School, it is a book well worth seeing in person.

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/en/collections/kharkiv-school-of-photography/products/bolnichka-by-vladyslav-krasnoshchok

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