In 1994 and 1995, social services in Luhansk, a town in southeastern Ukraine, sent photographers door to door to make passport pictures for elderly and ill residents who could not travel to a studio or pay for the service. Alexander Chekmenev was one of them. He arrived alongside social workers whose ordinary rounds involved delivering free medicine and groceries, and he photographed people in the rooms where they would spend their final years. The resulting book, Passport, published by Dewi Lewis in 2017, gathers 76 colour and black-and-white photographs across 156 pages. Its shortlisted status for the Arles Author Book Award that year indicates the regard in which it was held by a jury of photography professionals.
The pictures carry an unusual double burden. Officially, each one exists to certify an identity for the state. In practice, Chekmenev’s subjects—some blind, some bedridden, some confused about why they were being seated before a camera—were often near the end of lives that had already been administratively forgotten. One man died the day after his portrait was made; an old woman kept a coffin in the room next to where she slept; a 92-year-old had filled his own coffin with empty vodka bottles before giving it away. These stories, recounted in the book’s accompanying text, are not sensational asides. They describe the atmosphere in which the photographs were taken, and they clarify what kind of attention Chekmenev was able to offer.
The sequence moves between colour and monochrome, between formal portrait conventions and the disorder of domestic interiors. Social workers sometimes had to hold a subject upright or steady a backdrop, and those arrangements remain visible at the edges of the frame. Chekmenev, who began his career in a Luhansk studio and moved to Kiev in 1997, brought an insider’s familiarity to a region then enduring the collapse of the Soviet Union. The book’s design—22.5 by 30 centimetres, hardcover—gives the pictures room to sit without overstatement.
For collectors, Passport belongs to a small group of 1990s documentary projects that treat bureaucratic photography as a subject in itself rather than as a neutral record. Chekmenev’s later international exhibition history, including shows in Newcastle, Cardiff and Portland, gives the work a context beyond its immediate moment, but the book stands on its own as a sustained, unsentimental encounter with people the state had asked to be documented one last time.
