Odesa (Ukrainian: Одеса) by Ukrainian-born photographer Yelena Yemchuk was made in Odesa, Ukraine, from 2015 to 2019, portraying the city and its inhabitants as young people entered adulthood amid war. Prompted by Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, Yemchuk initially photographed sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds preparing for military service at the Odesa Military Academy. She then widened the project to encompass the recruits' social environment, surrounding landscape, and everyday urban life.
This expanded scope examines youth, historical transition, and the uneasy proximity of ordinary freedoms to armed conflict. Yemchuk's position combines personal familiarity with Ukraine and the curiosity of discovering Odesa as a distinct place. Following Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, the photographs also came to function as records of life before that escalation, presenting an alternative to images centered on destruction.
The sequence moves between closely framed portraits and environmental views of beaches, fields, domestic interiors, streets, nightlife, the Potemkin Stairs, and the mud resort at Kuyalnik. Military uniforms appear beside informal youth culture, theatrical dress, older residents, weathered rooms, and urban exteriors. Soft color and faded earth tones contribute to a suspended atmosphere, while direct gazes and upward-angled close-ups lend many portraits a pronounced physical presence. The overall mood shifts between intimacy, humor, melancholy, and uncertainty.
Exploratory photographs made in 2013 used black-and-white film, but Yemchuk subsequently chose color for the sustained series. Working over repeated visits, she found subjects through friends and their acquaintances, encounters in the streets and on beaches, and local events traced through newspaper listings. The portraits involved little staging, although Yemchuk occasionally brought sitters to fields or beaches she had chosen.
GOST Books published Odesa in May 2022, sequencing 111 full-color images without conventional captions and interspersing them with short poems by Ukrainian-born poet Ilya Kaminsky. A second printing followed that fall, and GOST also issued a special edition with a C-type print. The project appeared in Ukrainian Photography Today at The Print Center in Philadelphia in 2022, with exhibited works including pigment prints. In 2023 it received a solo presentation at The Ukrainian Museum in New York and was exhibited at Fotografia Europea, and in 2025 it was shown at Fotografihuset in Oslo. The book received the 2022 Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Award Special Juror's Mention for "PhotoBooks for Ukraine," and was longlisted for the 2023 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award.
