Bitter Honeydew
by Kirill Golovchenko
(Dewi Lewis Publishing, £30)

KIRILL GOLOVCHENKO’S colour photographs, taken at night in  artificial light, evoke an eerie, almost surreal world.

The award-winning Ukrainian photographer’s images of  his homeland in Bitter Honeydew are a sort of pyrrhic celebration.

A disembodied farm labourer’s grimy hand daintily holds a small piece of melon, like a moon against the black night. A metal bowl of borscht on the bare earth attains the quality of an ancient religious artefact and a tangle of electrical cables and plugs hanging from a tree, connected up to an old sound system,  transports us to somewhere the modern world appears to have passed by.

Each photograph is paired with and mirrors or comments on the one opposite. The colours of raw, red meat on skewers is repeated in the gaudy red-patterned blouse of the peasant woman on the facing page.

As there are no text or captions we’re obliged to use our imagination to comprehend the images and give them context.

Clearly we are in the countryside, where life is harsh and precarious — the people portrayed live in makeshift accommodation in the fields.

Melons feature repeatedly in many different forms and combinations in Golovchenko’s work, taking on an almost symbolic character. This is the staple crop that provides work and purpose in this area.

A large heap of thr green-striped, freshly picked fruit lies clustered around the trunk of a tree, like skulls waiting to be split open.
On the opposite page, a bare-chested, leather-jacketed youth, pistol thrust in his trouser belt, wields a baseball bat. Menace versus vulnerability.

The images are of outstanding technical and aesthetic quality and in a way they’re at odds with the roughness and earthiness of their subject matter.

The evident skill and visual sensitivity of the photographer is to be admired yet the fatalism of the people portrayed and the bleakness of the nocturnal imagery is simultaneously disturbing and depressing.

Golovchenko’s outlook is very Slavic. This is not so much the world of Chekhov but it’s certainly Dostoevskian, even Biblical, at times as he captures those mundane moments in the lives of a long-suffering people trapped in what seems to be a pre-written, ancient narrative.