Spotlighting the aesthetics and photobook of Viacheslav Poliakov, a young Ukrainian photographer who attended portfolio reviews with Kevin WY Lee at Odessa//Batumi Photodays Festival.
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Lviv–God’s Will is about those of us with whom life just happens. It takes place when the connection between cause and consequence is no longer coherent.
I am documenting a naïve visual subculture of a public space, which has become widely spread throughout Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union, and faced with globalization. For me, a central peculiarity of the culture is the absence of a conscious author. The objects of the city environment are formed by means of accidental interaction of unrelated people, by mistakes, destructions, and wild vegetation. By no one – everything is God’s will.
All the objects collected in the book were photographed without any interference on my part. However, in most photographs, I сut off the background in order to isolate the subjects from all that chaos, which usually surrounds them.
“Lviv – Bozha Volya (literally God’s Will)” – a bus route, which connects a city with a small village lost in the forests on a very border with the European Union.
“Bozha Volya” in Ukrainian derives from the same word root as madness.
The name is an artistic image and has nothing in common with geography.
Photographs & Text: Viacheslav Poliakov, Ukraine. Website: www.via-poliakov.com
Viacheslav Poliakov (В’ячеслав Поляков) was born in 1986 in Kherson, Ukraine and is now based in Lviv. In 2007 he obtained a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Kherson State University. Viacheslav came to photography in 2012, and since than combines his graphic and motion designer career with personal photography projects.
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