Kirill Golovchenko – Bitter Honeydew

Kehrer Verlag 2015

In the summer months, little markets rise up along the Ukrainian freeways that usually consist of individual, simply made fruit and vegetable stands. Some of the vendors stay overnight, putting up tents or small wooden shacks, or they live with their families in trailers. Their nighttime labors are the theme of the series Bitter Honeydew by the photographer Kirill Golovchenko. Not only the locals set up their stands on the side of the road. During the warm season, vendors also flock here from the margins of the former Soviet Union, from Belarus, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia. They all bring different customs and traditions with them, forming a microcosm in which diverse personalities are united by a single pursuit: making money in order to raise their standard of living, or simply to escape hunger. In emphatic portraits, Bitter Honeydew documents the street vendors’ daily struggle for survival. The series was awarded the Abisag-Tüllmann-Prize in 2013. With a poem by Serhiy Zhadan