No Direction Home

Andrej Krementschouk portrays his Russian homeland, where he is not at home anymore. In haunting images, he asks the ever-pertinent question of what is remembered and what is lost, seeking evidence of emotional rootedness and cultural identity:

I have to share something about this modest place that no one knows, something about me. . . . My house. I’m five years old. My grandfather, my grandmother and I are walking along a forest path that leads to our village. It’s hot. In a forest glade near the river my grandmother lays out some newspaper: boiled eggs, salt, slightly salty pickles, and dragonflies in the shimmering air.

The book includes an introductory text by leading Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov (born in 1938 in Kharkov), colleague and mentor to Krementschouk. Both artists' work is consistently humanist in their approaches, with strong emotional elements, a critical stance, and a sense of humor that audiences in both the East and the West have found moving.

Andrej Krementschouk, born 1973 in Gorki, Russia, studied photography with Ute Mahler at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences and has been a master-class student at the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts since 2008. He was a winner in the contest “gute aussichten—junge deutsche fotografie 2007–08” (“good prospects—young German photography”) and has exhibited at venues including the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Drostei, Pinneberg; and the Kalmar Art Museum, Sweden. His work has been published in magazines like GEO, sleek magazine, and Chrismon.