Expectations - project about Ukraine by Simon Crofts

This series of images were taken in the run up to the current war, before hostilities broke out in 2014. They were taken in many parts of Ukraine, but especially in the south-east - in Kherson and in Crimea.

Below is a small selection from the project. The work forms four ‘visual poems’ around the themes of Fortune, Utopia, Memory, and Fears, loosely inspired by Shostakovich’s 13th symphony (the ‘Babi Yar’) and Yevtushenko’s poems in that symphony.

The central theme of the project is Ukraine as a ‘land of endless expectations’, where there is a constant pull between the past and the present, the East and the West, and where over the previous hundred years aspirations for a brighter future have been regularly dashed in the cruellest of ways.

Let’s hope (and do what we can to make sure) that changes.