Artist
Marcin Kruk
Marcin Kruk (b. 1982) lives and works in Rzeszow, Poland. With a background in Archival and Historical Studies, he currently studies Photography at the Institute of Creative Photography in Opava, Czech Republic. A Fujifilm Poland ambassador, Kruk is also a member of the Archive of Public Protest (A-P-P). His practice revolves around a series of long-term documentary projects.
"No tears left to cry" / “Nie ma już łez do wypłakania”
My documentary project, which I’ve been making since the first days of the full scale Russian invasion on Ukraine in February 2022, is a story about civilians. I’m interested in the notion of war and its varied impacts on society, including genocide, the trauma it generates, and related processes of change in society and culture. It’s a dramatic story of unimaginable suffering, but also a story about rising from ruins and rebuilding a country.
This project, in some ways, is a personal one for me. Both my grandparents and great grandparents were forced to resettle from Ukraine to Poland in the 1940s. I was born in Ustrzyki Dolne, just 10 km from the Polish-Ukrainian border. Ukraine and its people have always been in my life.
Marcin Kruk is a Polish photographer who has been documenting his life between Poland and Ukraine since the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Kruk is also a member of The Archive of Public Protests, created by a group of Polish photographers as a project of visual activism. The topics that Marcin explores prove that taking pictures is a socially important mission for him.
Lisa Bukreyeva comes from Kiev. Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she had been documenting the lives of Ukrainian teenagers, but then the lives of these young people changed dramatically, and two of her more recent projects – Scars of Humanity and 2042 War Diary – document this change. So different from the images we are accustomed to seeing in the media, these two projects reveal the devastating experience of war.
Marysia Myanovska presents the pre-war experiences of Ukrainian youth. Recreating the story of his older brother through photographs, memories and stories, he takes us on a journey back in time to the 1990s – the first years after the collapse of the USSR. When talking about the past, Marysia avoids using archival materials or direct references to historical events and in this way, the project also becomes a poetic story about being lost, young and searching for one's place.
Ihar Hancharuk is a post-documentary photographer and visual artist from Belarus. Raised in an authoritarian country, Hancharuk is critical of phenomena and tools such as propaganda or upbringing in the cult of fighting and sacrifice for the homeland. He uses photography, video and digital archives to analyse the media message and its effects upon society.
Kinga Wrona is a documentary photographer from Poland. In his project 85 he shows the effects of the eruption of the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the island of La Palma, Spain. The strength of this cycle is primarily its precision: there are just ten near-abstract photographs showing what can happen when ‘nature entered people's lives suddenly and unexpectedly’.