The artist, known for capturing youth and prisoners, opens up about photography as a rebellious act.
sit down to discuss the nuances of their work, trade industry secrets, and fill each other in on their latest projects. The only catch? One of them is on staff atmagazine. In this week’s edition, visuals editor Michael Beckert chats with the photographer Michal Chelbin, an internationally acclaimed artist known for her portraits of Ukrainian youth. Her new book,I started photography when I was 14, in high school. I wasn’t a great student, and I was also very shy and quiet.
One of your previous bodies of work was about prisoners—who they are, and why they’ve been sentenced to jail. It seems like the connection between that body of work and this new book is the idea of being bound to an identity. The prisoners are bound quite literally by prison or their crimes, and the youth inare bound by the uniforms they wear. How did you find your subjects for this book?
Some of the subjects are from a military boarding school in Ukraine, and most of that work was taken over the course of five years, from 2015 to 2020. The second body of work depicts various boys in Matador schools in Spain; we actually cast some of the matadors from Instagram. There’s a third body of work in the book about teenagers going to prom in Kiev. This book is all about uniforms—the performance of wearing them and fitting into the identities they connote.
That they trust me! I want to make work with people who want to be photographed, and who trust the vision.I think everyone wants to be remembered, so it’s very voluntary. In the prison work, there were several different prisons that I photographed in, and when we got there, there was always this fear that subjects wouldn’t want to be photographed, since it was voluntary. But every time we’d arrive at the prison, there would be a long line out the door of prisoners who wanted to be photographed.
I had my moments, but I wasn’t very dramatic. It was through the photography that I rebelled, really. I did have two older sisters who were quite rebellious. As they grew up, they became a lot more proper, I guess you’d call it. Now I’m the one who seems a bit more rebellious, having gone into the arts. My father didn’t really see how photography could be its own path; I think he thought it was a bad habit. Even now, he doesn’t realize that it’s become something quite significant for my life.
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