Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, May 8, 2025: Yelena Yemchuk, an Ukrainian/New York-based visual artist, photographer (#2273)

Thursday, May 8, 2025

Artist of the Day, May 8, 2025: Yelena Yemchuk, an Ukrainian/New York-based visual artist, photographer (#2273)

Yelena Yemchuk, born in Kyiv, Ukraine is now a New York-based visual artist. She is a photographer, filmmaker, and painter whose style is highly recognizable as it always connects the past with the present in a timeless, dreamlike, nostalgist but never melancholic way. In a recent interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, on Yelena’s latest photo book Malanka (Edition Patrick Frey, 2024), the art historian and journalist Beatrice Zamponi describes Yelena’s idiosyncratic way of art making with the following words:

“Her practice is characterized by a strong expressive plurality: she mixes photography and drawing, reportage images and constructed photos, past and present, reality and dream. In a fluid path, freed from preconceived structures. This freedom not to lock herself into fixed categories, to constantly change form and time even within the same project, tells well how the female approach to photography today stands out for its originality and dynamism.”

Born in Kyiv, Ukraine, Yelena immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was eleven years old. She became interested in photography when her father, an athlete, gave her a 35 Minolta camera for her fourteenth birthday. She went on to study art at Parsons School of Design in New York and photography at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. She has exhibited photography, paintings, and films in solo and group shows at galleries and museums across the globe. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, AnOther Magazine, and i-D, among many others.

Book publishing has been part of Yelena’s artistic practice for many years. In 2011, together with Damiani, she released her first photo book titled Gidropark. Like many of her projects, this book is autobiographical: before immigrating to the US, Yelena spent her summers at Gidropark, a recreational area in Kyiv along the Dnieper River which Yelena describes as a “Soviet version of Coney Island”. In 2017, she published Anna with United Vagabonds which gathers intimate photographs she took of her close friend Anna over a 24-year period. In 2019, Yelena had her institutional debut at Dallas Contemporary, showing her multimedia project Mabel, Betty, & Bette. A monograph with the same title was released by Kominek Books in 2021. In 2022, Gost Books published Odesa which was shortlisted for the Jurors’ Special Mention by Aperture during Paris Photo 2022. A portion of the book sales of Odesa was donated to the Voices of Children, supporting kids impacted by the war in Ukraine. Also in 2022, Depart Pour l’Image published Yelena’s mixed media book УYY which was shortlisted by the Paris Photo/Aperture Awards in the category Photobook of the Year and which won the Book Award in the International category by PHotoESPAÑA. In 2024, Swiss independent publisher Edition Patrick Frey released Yelena’s sixth photo book, Malanka, a personal, feminine, surrealist body of work - marked by integrity and magic.

In 2024, Depart Pour L’image published Mise en Abyme, a continuation of УYY, which contains residual images of typographical proofs, enlargements, paintings, and photographs.

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