Epitome is a visual essay, a deeply personal journey of here and now, but also of there and then. It has grown out of a necessity to find personal peace and balance in a time of turmoil. It became both a meditation and a contemplative search for meaning in the time of modern war.
Consisting of pictures of war-torn places shot in 2022 in Ukraine, the series also includes the ones printed from a vast archive of ten years. Hearing the roaming of air raid sirens, the palm-sized pictures were printed under the red safelight in Bakin’s makeshift darkroom in his Kyiv apartment. The uncertainty, unease, and fragility, but also beauty and tenderness, became the main essence of the series.
«A weathered pile of discarded chairs under the rain, photographed just days before the chaos. It is what it is, but for me, it is a very temporary sculpture dedicated to our time, the symbol of chaos, suspended dreams, plans, and hopes. It somehow holds itself, but will it rather rot to ashes first or just fall apart?»
Vic Bakin is a self-educated Ukrainian photographer. Raised in western Ukraine, he has been based in Kyiv for the past ten years. His work focuses primarily on documenting Ukrainian youth, and more recently, on the themes surrounding the war in Ukraine. His series Epitome (2023) was selected as one of The Ones to Watch by the British Journal of Photography and received a LensCulture Photography Award.
Bakin is a two-time Documenting Ukraine grant recipient (IWM Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna) and was selected for the Copenhagen Photo Festival in 2024. His first monograph, Epitome, published by Photo Void in 2024, is a finalist for the Lucie Photo Book Prize (2025).
He exhibited his work in Ukraine, France, Germany, Morocco, Sweden, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Australia and the USA. He’s been published in the British Journal of Photography, Le Monde, The Guardian, Liberation, La Repubblica, Suddeutsche Zeitung, New York Times, Publico, Dust Magazine, Butt Magazine, Vogue Ukraine, and Hunger Magazine, among others.