Photographer Misha Friedman says his study of Ukrainian prisons is about the traces that a society leaves behind. At the root of his work, though, are the people left behind.
For his latest project, Friedman, a veteran photographer in Eastern Europe, secured wide-ranging access to Ukraine’s penal system — a labyrinth of post-Soviet human tragedy. But his photographs have almost no people in them. Instead, he trains the lens on prisons’ layout and decor, arguing that those details tell the story of a society in flux.
