Photobook Review: Epitome by Vic Bakin

Epitome tells the story of the conflict in Ukraine. It’s a visceral book in which earth, water, foliage, and flesh are balanced against images of destruction and desolation on both a physical and psychological level.

Epitome is a book of scars; scarred landscapes, scarred flora, scarred psyches, and scarred prints. It’s a book that has its roots in the land, the brown of the cover like the soil, the silk-screened silhouette of a sunflower set against an almost nuclear sun.

The photographs begin with a torso, head cut off, arms leaving the frame at the rest. It’s a man’s body, a young man scarcely out of boyhood. It’s a scarred body, a body that at second glance seems to have parts missing, lumps of flesh hollowed out of the chest, arms strangely out of kilter. It’s a mutilated body printed dark, charcoal grain etching itself into the young man’s skin.

Move forward and we’re outside, three lopped trees appearing out of a rural gloom, and then we see destruction, the bricks and mortar of a house scattered over the foreground, the bare frames of windows bearing witness to what has passed, a pile of chairs lying against a glade of trees, simultaneously salvaged and abandoned in an act of bewilderment, in the moment of not knowing what to save so saving it anyway.

More fragments follow, the shaven head and staring eyes of Sasha, his mouth cut off, voiceless against the violence he is forced to behold, then the naked torso of a slight young man standing against a dark background, his head removed. It’s another image where the charcoal tones merge into black, where the sensuality of the young man, the beauty of these young men whose bodies, whose lives, whose loves have been stymied by the war, have both a sadness and a beauty to them.

It’s a sadness and a beauty that is echoed in the repeated images of sunflowers lying untended in a field, their heads bowed under the weight of the years that have not been gathered or pressed.

Throughout the book, there is a sense of longing, desire, and touch that can find no outlet. Well there is an outlet, one that lies beneath the surface, one that is evident in the final image of a young man sitting in what could almost pass for belted combat trousers, his fingers half-latched together, his eyes in their own world, concealing something that lies beneath, a mark, a scar, a shadow.

The sense of scarring is something apparent in the prints. They’re dark, they’re flawed, they’re rough. Made in ramshackle darkroom during air-raids in Kyiv, these are modest prints where the imperfections are part of the process.

During the printing, Bakin ran out of fixer and so used the same batch until it was finally exhausted. As with Sally Mann’s Proud Flesh, or Morganna Magee’s Extraordinary Experiences, the blotches, the scrapes, the bare edges of torn prints connect to the story being told, become part of the story being told. These are not deliberately determined flaws, they are unpredictable and random in nature, flaws that mirror the arbitrary nature of the war, the indeterminacy of what who will live and who will die, and how they will live and how they will die.

It’s not an aesthetic, or a technique, but something closer to the soul of what is happening in Kyiv and Ukraine, the essential struggle of war, the danger of war, the loss of war.

Epitome is as much about what is lost in this conflict, about the lives, the loves, the passions that aren’t lived. That absence leaves a mark and that is apparent in Epitome. Like Kikuji Kawada’s Chizu, this is a book of scars, but rather than being distant scars, these are scars that are have been lived through every day of the last two and a half year.

But scars can be beautiful. Very sad but beautiful, just like this book.

This is a book of scars, with the process itself being a scar, a part of the work that is directly woven into the story that is being told.

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Epitome by Vic Bakin is published by Void

21,5 x 26 cm
176 pages
750 copies
Screenprinted Hardcover
ISBN 978-618-5479-35-0

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Vic Bakin is a self-educated Ukrainian photographer. Raised in the west of Ukraine, for the last ten years he has been based in Kyiv. In his work, Bakin is focused on documenting Ukraine's youth. Recently, his focus has also shifted to the themes of war in Ukraine.

Colin Pantall is a photographer, writer and lecturer based in Bath, England. His next online courses begin in September, 2024. More information here. Follow him on Instagram