The photographer has been shooting for four years what is happening on a bench in the Ukrainian courtyard

The theme of the bench is not new in the history of photography. Almost all well-known genre photographers took great pleasure in shooting and are shooting life on benches. Sculptors turn benches into monuments and into works of almost jewelry art. And let's remember Herluf Bidstrup's cartoons!

Zhenya Kotenko chose a bench not on the street, boulevard or in the park. He found it in his yard — an unsightly, patched, wounded structure, once painted in the blue of the sky by the forces of the house management, then in red, or vice versa, constantly experiencing the apocalypse.

It's not even a bench, but a bench, i.e. something ridiculous, funny, around which there are always mountains of cigarette butts, sunflower seeds, bottles and other garbage. Funny, at one point an urn appeared next to her. At first it was a dull gray color, then it was not very carefully painted. Garbage, however, has not decreased on earth. The urn periodically disappeared and returned again.

1. Photographer Zhenya Kotenko

Kotenko spent four years filming everything that happened on the bench. It turned out to be a secretly watched theater, almost Shakespearean grotesque, intensity and sharpness. And it involves not only people, but also a dog, a cat... restless, hungry animals. Here life and death sit side by side, rub against each other, laugh at each other, mock each other.

2.

The director, the restless "reveller" Bacchus, amuses with his performances for one viewer (photographer), in which, however, a contemptuous tone dominates. This mood is also transmitted to a person with a camera, whose intonation is ironically squeamish. 

The effect of peeping increases the curiosity of the viewer, who gets involved in peeping, experiences pleasant feelings peculiar to voyeurs, from doing something not quite right, allowed, from penetrating into someone else's secret. Kotenko, of course, is a provocateur.

3.

Zhenya did not just shoot, but researched a whole social stratum of the population of Ukraine. He also got a bench in the form of an image of a wound that tears itself apart, deepens, irritates.

4.

The photographer watches everything that happens on the bench from above, simulates the look of God having fun and indifferently contemplating what is happening. It seems that he put a bench here and forced the photographer to join life on it, once again instructing us that a man came out of the ground: he was "born of dirt."

5.

The bench is a model of the world. Everything revolves around the bench. Couples who are exhausted from love thirst, who have nowhere to go, are looking for a bench; alcoholics and homeless people do not imagine their life without a bench at all — for them it is a house, a table, a toilet, and a bed; children constantly break benches; students on benches swallow up the missing knowledge before exams; old people on benches live out their last days.

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