Sean O'Hagan 

Maidan, Portraits from the Black Square review – moving images of the Kiev protesters

Anastasia Taylor-Lind eschews reportage for quietly effective portraiture on the front line of the anti-government protests, writes Sean O'Hagan
  
  

kiev
Vasily, 52, Protester from Komorovo, 10th February 2014 (detail), from Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square by Anastasia Taylor-Lind. Photograph: Anastasia Taylor-Lind/VII/Gost Photograph: Anastasia Taylor-Lind/VII/Gost

When the photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind arrived in Kiev on 1 1 February 2014, protesters had been assembling in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) daily for almost three months to voice their collective impatience with their staunchly pro-Russian president. Over that time, tensions had risen and violence had flared sporadically because of the often brutal reaction of the police, who ruthlessly applied new anti-protest laws, abducted anti-government activists and regularly launched attacks on the protesters.

Taylor-Lind found herself in the midst of a situation fast approaching an explosively violent culmination as the protesters fought back against the police with homemade weapons. On 20 February, the violence in and around the square reached such a pitch that the president fled the country the following day. By then, 112 people had died and many more were missing.

As its title suggests, Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square is not a book of reportage or photojournalism. Instead it collects the portraits of the protesters that Taylor-Lind made during that time in a hastily erected studio in the square. All are taken against a black cloth backdrop and evince a calm that belies the atmosphere in which they were made.

"I chose a black background because black was the colour of Maidan," Taylor-Lind later explained, "Everything there was burnt; the square was covered with black soot and filled with black smoke. Even people's skin turned black, which was ironically referred to as the 'Maidan Tan'. I was also drawn to the black background, as it is the colour of grief and of mourning."

Taylor-Lind erected her makeshift studio on Hrushevskoho Street, the frontline of the protests. Initially, she only photographed the young men, many of them wearing "battle armour" that they had made themselves as the protests became more organised and militant. After the worst of the violence, when the news of the killings spread, the square filled up with tens of thousands of women, many of them bringing flowers to lay on the barricades. Taylor-Lind's portraits of male protesters and fighters are punctuated with calmer studies of female mourners, the one series ominous and provocative, the other peaceful and self-contained.

In their quiet way, these images say a lot about the different roles of men and women in a time of conflict.

Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square is a powerfully concentrated statement, both about the nature and cost of violent protest. It eschews the familiar route of visceral, on-the-ground reportage for something more restrained and considered. You look into the faces of these ordinary people and you cannot help but wonder what it took to bring them to this point and what has happened to them since.

Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square is published by GOST, £35

 

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