Olena Slyesarenko – Small Economies

Posted by Fabio 20 February 2013

This project examines the quickly changing commercial landscape of Ukraine and its impact on the work force. By moving indoors, into corporate supermarkets and malls, it is becoming more Westernized and homogeneous. The archive of images of street vendors and other small, unlicensed businesses records an element of Ukrainian visual culture as it disappears. Not without irony, the beach portraits capture a black-market economy in the sunshine.

Ukrainian Olena Slyesarenko earned an MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Westminster and studied BA in Photography at Glasgow School of Art and at the Pratt Institute in New York. She has worked with a number of well-known photographers; her work has been exhibited in WASPS Studios, Newbery Gallery, Glasgow, London Gallery West, Ambika P3, London, and, along with her writing, has been published in F2 Freelance Photographer, the Royal Photographic Society Journal and in the book ‘Creative Photography: Context and Narrative’ by Maria Short ‘. She is currently working as a Photographic Production Assistant at AnOther Magazine.