Antler Press is an independent publishing house based in the UK. A couple of weeks ago, Antler Press messaged me to see if I'd like to review one of their zines. They sent
Kievbound by Mariya Ustymenko, the first zine from their
Antler Document series which focuses on documentary photography.
Mariya Ustymenko is a Ukrainian visual artists who currently lives in England. I spoke about her recently when I reviewed
Adventitious, the zine that Mariya and Carlos Cancela Pinto have started to put together.
In Kievbound, Mariya documents daily scenes from her life in her native city, Kiev. Mariya describes these images as "a very personal perception of her surroundings that convey a state of mind rather than document a certain place or time".
Mariya protrays her friends, the buildings and animals of the city where she grew up. There's some sense of decadence in Mariya's images, but she states that "beauty or ugliness is beyond equation here. The story, I guess, is about the humanity of its characters".
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