Robin Hinsch began photographing in Ukraine in 2010, drawn there by the description of Viktor Yanukovych as the new dictator between East and West. He kept returning. Lonely Are All the Bridges gathers more than a decade of that sustained attention into a portrait of a country and its inhabitants, published by GOST Books in 2026 with an essay by the art historian Julian Stallabrass.
The photographs are not news images. Soviet ruins and historical monuments stand in rain, mist, or snow; people are placed deliberately within workplaces, homes, fields, ruins, and battlefields. The book moves between monochrome and colour, the colour held down by grey skies. Together these decisions loosen the pictures from a single date, so that they seem to belong to an indistinct era rather than to the headlines. Animals recur throughout: a bear pacing a zoo enclosure, a child in bear costume, feral cats and dogs, wild horses. Desertion and abandonment are their obvious subjects, but they also give the book an allegorical, dreamlike register that resists documentary flattening. The bridge of the title, taken from a poem by Ingeborg Bachmann, returns as an image of connection that is also, by its nature, isolated.
Hinsch has acknowledged Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror as a model, and the book adopts something of that film’s fragmented structure, letting memories, dreams, and moments from different times sit alongside one another instead of resolving into narrative. The result is melancholy rather than polemical, and it declines the roles of hero and villain. What it describes are the slow forces that pull a society apart and the fragile, often ambivalent threads that hold it together.
