Kiev – Ukraine. A Country and an entire culture held between tradition and innovation; between the persistence of a remote but strongly shared past and prospects of a future dedicated to the acceleration and to the desire of homogenization.
Ignacio Maria Coccia’s work is recorded in a well known form of documentary photography: the portrait of a Country. His view, common denominator of so many photo-reportages in the last fifteen years, dwells upon a transitional moment that testifies a dying out world, which survives in a general climate of renovation.
What fascinates me in this kind of jobs, also by a historiographical point of view is the limitedness sense of the truth that they emanate; they represent historical moments quickly destined, without appeal, to leave place to something else. I often have the strange impression to see evanescent figures, against the light, running away as chased. These photos are similar to the post-war period photos. This transitoriness is often seized by the photographers better than any expert of social sciences. It’s the irreplaceable talent of the photography.
So, it is offered to us the representation of situations that seem trapped in a dimension of eternal fixity but in the knowledge that their definitive capitulation will soon happen. The old and the new live together in the world like great-grandfather and grandson. The distance between the old traditions and the collective pressure to the change is very evident and visible.
The photos by Ignacio Coccia Maria reveal this duality of worlds by documenting calmly the everyday life. The scenes are often chosen among the places of transit par excellence: streets, buses, stations, hospitals. This climate is well expressed by some images: one picture depicts two boys in a park: one of them is walking in-line straight on a well marked dark trace, while the other one is turning faster and with a long step, just to represent symbolically two different ways of changing. Another photography represents a young lady, with her head covered, in the orthodox Coves which is the orthodox cult temple of Kiev: she seems to be lost on a background that is dizzily turning around her.
These images document not only the daily gestures but also the states of mind. The course of the daily life is observed in relation to its impact on the collective feeling. The story is this. A city in continuous transformation on the background, contrasting feelings inside the people, for many of them, nearly all, the problems of ever.
The new train station seems like a Swiss bank and the office district is going to become similar to the first world cities’ one; but the main hospital of Kiev seems still the same of a small poor city one and the children sick with leukaemia are treated in run-down structures in the forbidden zones limits of Chernobyl. Orphans, so many orphans among institutes and sidewalks, the rubbish of inadequate social services, a still strongly and persistent devotion for the religious orthodoxy. But there are neon and skyscrapers mixed up with the people in the city, and western trademarks are sneering at the historical palaces of the central square dedicated to the Independence. A political independence conquered also at the price of an economic dependence. A photo taken from below, amidst glasses and mirrors, seems to underline the dangerous ambiguity of the process. By running through the photos, we see portraits of American jazz myths standing out in the cloakroom of one of the most fashionable place of the city, unthinkable transgression only some year ago, while a young Ukrainian girl decides to pose in a subway station in front of one of the last remaining monumental Lenin’s bust in the city. The families have picnic in the cemeteries in order to be close to their dead. The atmosphere of recent catastrophes is still in the air, amidst lights and shadows; but they wants to find the strength to go on, in spite of everything, and it’s visible in the sweet and young smile of a greengrocer in her shop at the end of her working day in the general markets or in a flash of black eyes of an old writer, with a matryoshka face, in front of the poets’ circle.
© Paola Riccardi for Ignacio Maria Coccia