After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it became necessary in the newly independent Ukraine to replace old Soviet passports with the new Ukrainian ones. There was a rush to accomplish this in the shortest possible time. All Ukrainians had to get a new passport within a year. In 1994, the social services of Lugansk, a town in southeast of Ukraine, started offering photographers a job of shooting passport photos in homes of the elderly and ill citizens, who could not pay a photographer on their own. Alexander Chekmenev was one of the photographers commissioned by the social services to go door to door during this national passportisation campaign. This is how he ended up in the homes of these people, along with the social workers whose job was to provide free medicine and groceries. He has realized an impressive work on the though way of living in the country side of Ukraine, which recalls Mikhaïlov’s reports of the leftovers of our society.
“When I saw how people were living out the final years of their lives, it had made a very strong impression on me. I remember a blind woman. I did not know that she was blind, so I asked her to look into the camera, but she said that she could not see. I thought, why would a blind person need a passport? She did not have too much time left anyway.”
Alexander Chekmenev