Yelena Yemchuk’s Odesa gathers photographs made in a Black Sea city that has long carried the reputation of a freer, stranger place than the Soviet order around it. Growing up in Kyiv, Yemchuk knew Odesa by its stories before she knew it in person: a port of jokes and improvisation, of intellectuals and outlaws, of acceptance and danger in the same breath. She first visited in 2003 and returned in 2015 to photograph the city and its inhabitants across four years. The book is published by GOST Books, with a catalogue date of 2022 and 176 pages in hardback; a separate catalogue record lists a 2023 date and paperback binding, so edition details vary by source. A text is credited to Ilya Kaminsky.

The photographs are not reportage in a hurry. Yemchuk works with people, interiors, shoreline, and street, allowing the mood of a place to accumulate rather than announcing itself image by image. Her background shapes the looking: her family left Kyiv in 1981, when she was eleven, and could not return; a decade later, after Ukrainian independence, she was able to come back. Odesa is therefore a homecoming at one remove — a city in the country she left, approached through its own distinct myths. The result is affectionate but unsentimental, attentive to contradiction.

Odesa matters as a record of a specific city and its people at a particular moment, made over years rather than days. Its sequencing lets a character emerge that no single picture could hold: the port’s tolerance and its edge, the wit and the wariness. Kaminsky’s participation places the images in conversation with poetry, an apt pairing for a city whose reputation is bound up with language and performance.