Andrei Mosienko’s career has been sharply divided between his photographs of ordinary workers on the one hand, and his photographs of the politicians, oligarchs, and other
assorted hangers-on of the Viktor Yanukovych administration on the other.
Mosienko served as one of Yanukovych’s official photographers during the ill-fated, four-year presidency that ended in the Kremlinbacked president fleeing on Feb. 22, 2014, to Russia, where he remains in exile, as the EuroMaidan Revolution closed in on him.
But Mosienko remained in Ukraine, despite facing scorn for his association with Yanukovych, and carries on with the job he loves: that of a photojournalist.
The Kyiv-based Mosienko has published two picture books to date, Havana Kings in 2011 and Khlib (Bread) in 2018. The settings are far apart, one in urban Cuba and the other in rural Ukraine, but the focus remains on ordinary people.
Urban Cuba
Havana Kings is a visual history of a bygone Cuba, one which has begun to fade out of existence due to the pressures of globalization. It was shot in the waning years of the late Fidel Castro’s rule, which ended in 2011, five years before the revolutionary leader’s death. In it are the bakers, boxers, and others who Mosienko found on Havana’s streets.
The narrative is bilingual, in English and in Ukrainian.
Rural Ukraine
Bread was a four-year project documenting the process of making the daily staple. His shots take place in village communities across Ukraine.
Mosienko talks of the importance of those engaged in breadmaking: “All life is based on these simple people… ordinary people do (these jobs). They work in the fields, they work in the mill, they work in the flour factories. They make the bread.”
He maintains that there is nothing “as simple, as important as bread.”
Started 25 years ago
Mosienko started his career in 1996 at the Eastern Economist and joined Kyievskiye Vedomosti in 1999. In 2005, he was invited by the Yanukovych-led Party of Regions to become their official photographer for the 2006 parliamentary elections campaign. This was the beginning of an eight-year working relationship when his professional fortunes were tied to Yanukovych.
When the Party of Regions won the elections and Yanukovych rose to prime minister, Mosienko became the official photographer of the Cabinet of Ministers. When Yanukovych won the 2010 presidential election, Mosienko became one of the administration’s official photographers. His job came to an abrupt end soon after Yanukovych fled power.
Insider’s view
The years spent photographing Ukraine’s fourth president allowed Mosienko an insider’s view of what went on, who came and went, how the president and those around him behaved. Much like Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s passion for winning at ice hockey, Mosienko said Yanukovych developed a similar affinity for tennis.
“He started to play tennis when he was 50. He just kept doing it. He was not a tennis player at all. The (other) players were assisting him, they were helping him because he was the president. Nobody wanted to disturb him. Everybody wanted him to win.”
“Girl without Pearl Earrings” from Bread (2018), which documented the bread-making process in Ukrainian villages. The photographer, Andrii Mosienko, came to Kyiv from Dnipro as a student “with two dollars in my pocket.” He got a job photographing Viktor Yanukovych and then lost it after the EuroMaidan Revolution ousted the president. He started over. “I am happy and proud of my job.” (Andrei Mosienko)
Cuban visit
He had regular contact with Yanukovych. During Yanukovych’s 2011 visit to Cuba, Mosienko asked the Ukrainian president to give Fidel Castro a copy of Havana Kings, as well as a print of Irina Pap’s photograph of the Cuban leader visiting Kyiv in 1961.
“There was an official visit to Raul (Castro) and the whole delegation was there. Then on Saturday, we were supposed to meet Fidel Castro. His security guards didn’t allow me to photograph, but I passed the pictures to our security detail, the photographs and my book. So Mr. Yanukovych passed my book to Fidel Castro this way.”
Mezhyhirya commute
The photographer also talked about the Russian-speaking Yanukovych’s attempted to learn Ukrainian. “You know how he was studying Ukrainian? It took 19 minutes to drive from Mezhyhirya to Kyiv. After his morning gymnastics, he was sitting in a car, and there was a female teacher who would speak to him in Ukrainian.”
Despite the rampant corruption of the Yanukovych era and its violent end in 2014, Mosienko, who is from the eastern city of Dnipro, still sees some good points in the former president.
“He is a real top manager, he is a very complicated person… maybe even many-sided, he had lots of fields of interest,” adding that he “understood the workings of the economy brilliantly.”
Mosienko talked of the often-demanding hours which the job required: “It was sometimes a 20-hour (work) day… it was a hard (way to earn one’s) bread. It was sometimes 20 hours of work. Mostly it was about 14 hours a day, the days were quite long.”
Snapping political stars
However, he says that he thoroughly enjoyed “the possibility to travel and see the world… to see life,” as well as to take photographs of figures such as then-U.S. President Barack Obama, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and then-Japanese emperor Akihito.
While working for the presidential administration in 2011, Mosienko published Havana Kings, the material for which came from two trips of two weeks each — in 2005 and again in 2008.
Mosienko was captivated by the individual stories he saw in the city’s bakeries, beauty parlors, boxing gyms and doorways.
He explains: “Havana is a very simple place. There is a big contradiction in the title, because there is no king in Havana. They have never been kings like (the Royal Family) in London, but they are kings in the sense that when you walk down the street there’s always sun, it’s always warm… here is your town!” Mosienko summarizes Havana Kings as “a travel book. It’s about sun, it’s about dreams, and it’s about (one’s) young years.”
Last assignment
Mosienko’s last assignment for Yanukovych was photographing the Feb. 21 signing of an agreement with opposition leaders for early elections in Ukraine. The next day, the president fled to Russia, via Kharkiv and Crimea. After this, Mosienko decided to take a long holiday, as he had collected lots of unclaimed vacation days in the previous several years. When he came back, he was not relieved of his duties immediately: “I was only fired in summer, in July.”
He recalls his last assignment in the job: “It was on the 9th of May, (Acting President Oleksandr) Turchynov was at a ceremony laying flowers at the monument of Eternal Glory.”
After the EuroMaidan Revolution that prompted Yanukovych and dozens of members of his administration to flee abroad, Mosienko experienced a fall from grace.
Fall from grace
“The most disappointing moment for me was that all the people who were surrounding me for many years basically stopped calling me and getting in touch right after the events of February,” he said.
Former Yanukovych allies, he said, simply wanted to move on and did not want to associate with anybody connected to the administration. “It’s a new life, they need new people, new qualities. They don’t want to remember the past. They don’t want to discuss it. That’s people. That’s the theatre of politics.”
An image from Havana Kings (2011), which chronicled ordinary lives on the streets of the Cuban capital. (Andrei Mosienko)
Just a photographer
Mosienko still receives regular criticism for his work with the disgraced former president:: “I am constantly tied to this. Because of the fact that I worked with Yanukovych, nobody offered me work. I made ‘Bread’ with my own savings. I had to find money to get it published because to print a book one needs a lot of money. I asked lots of people, but many of them answered me ‘You need money? Remind me where you worked.’ I was not a minister, I was not (former environment minister Mykola) Zlochevsky or (former NSDC head Andriy) Klyuyev. I was not (former head of the Presidential Administration Serhiy) Lyovochkin. I was just a photographer.”
Mosienko says that to this day, people remember who his employer was before 2014: “Now I will finish this material, and they will remind me again where I used to work.” He says that “people kept asking me ‘Have you got a phone call from Rostov yet?’” The jibe refers to Yanukovych’s new place of residence, the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, after his escape in 2014.
Cathartic experience
After his years of photographing Party of Regions big shots, Mosienko found it cathartic to photograph a completely different set of people. “I remembered my bakers in Havana, and I thought I should do something about Ukraine… I saw a book about rice planting in Italy in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and I thought: My God! I live in Ukraine and I haven’t done a book about bread.”
Traveling country roads
He spent the next four years traveling Ukraine, taking photos of the breadmaking process on small-scale farms, painstakingly capturing the people and tools involved. The end result, Bread, was released in 2018.
Mosienko says that the subjects of his photos were delighted that somebody was telling their story: “They were very happy that a photographer from Kyiv came… to photograph them. ‘We will be stars, we will be models!’ For them, it was a funny and nice experience. I would say they are not spoiled with photographs. They are happy.”
Finding his passion
Throughout the interview, Mosienko flows with impassioned energy when discussing his photos of villagers, an effervescence which is notably lacking when he is talking about his time working with politicians.
At several points, he flicks excitedly through the pages of his book, pointing with his finger at photos of laborers toiling under the summer sun and narrating: “This guy is now in the army in Odesa, he is serving. This guy I think is still in the village. This is rye. This is not wheat, this is rye. This girl is in Poland now, she works there… she works in a factory assembling car window mechanisms.”
The photographer also enjoys recognizing motifs from famous artwork of the past in the poses and facial expressions of his subjects.
There is a strong association with Soviet-era Ukrainian painter Tetyana Yablonska’s 1949 work, also titled Bread. Mosienko was delighted when Gayane Atayan, Yablonska’s daughter and a renowned artist in her own right, said of the book:
“What a nice echo of mama’s work!”
As well as works close to home, Mosienko sees hints of classical European art in his shots: “The face of this guy I photographed refers to the Italian (Renaissance) period. There’s a famous sculpture by Donatello with a similar type of face. They call it condottiere. It’s in the town of Padua and it’s called Gattamelatta… I call him the Gattamelatta of Odesa,” the photographer says of a middle-aged man with sharp, hardened features. Another picture, one depicting a young woman tilting her head to look at the camera, Mosienko refers to as “Girl without Pearl Earrings,” a nod to Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. “I call it hooks on classics,” he quips.
Mosienko is still wrapped up in his Bread project. He is currently finishing a behind-the-scenes documentary about the making of his 2018 book. “This bread story is bigger than me, it’s difficult to do, and I find it natural and interesting because you touch real life.”
He says that were someone to ask him to take photos of politicians again, he “probably would not agree. It is a big story, but I am happy it is not the only story in my life.”
