Yelena Yemchuk (b. 1970) is a Ukrainian-American photographer, painter, and filmmaker based in New York City. Her multifaceted practice inhabits the in-between spaces where opposites meet and contradictions coexist. In these liminal spaces, she navigates questions of identity, displacement, and resilience, often through portraits that feel at once intimate and distant. Her latest exhibition, Ithaca / Іtака, currently on view at Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and followed by a screening programme of her films running till the end of October, reflects on Ukraine as both origin and exile, and the evolving roles of Ukrainian women against the backdrop of war.
Born in Kyiv, Yemchuk emigrated with her parents to the United States at the age of eleven, eventually settling in New York. The move marked what she describes as “the brutal end” of her childhood – a time she remembers vividly through summers spent along the Dnipro River. Her introduction to photography began with a gift from her father: a 35mm Minolta camera, which laid the foundation for her lifelong artistic practice. Photography became a means for Yemchuk to navigate the nostalgia and dislocation of migration, and later, a way to reengage with her home country, both physically and emotionally. Her childhood in Ukraine remains her source of inspiration. “I subconsciously went back to that time, and in a weird way, a place where I felt secure and safe, the place of magic”, the artist said to Vogue magazine.
Ukraine as Muse and Mirror
Yemchuk studied art at Parsons School of Design in New York and, later, photography at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. Her practice avoids fixed categories; she has worked in both fine art settings and commercial spaces. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, AnOther Magazine, and featured on an album cover for The Smashing Pumpkins. Alongside these commissions, she has built a deeply personal body of work – projects that trace her evolving relationship with Ukraine over three decades.
Her first photobook, Gidropark (2011), captured the eccentric vitality of a Soviet-era amusement park in Kyiv, a “Soviet version of Coney Island”, as she refers to it. The collection of photos reveals the contradictions of a society balancing nostalgia with the realities of post-Soviet life. Her subsequent photo books, Odesa (2021) and УYY (2022), deepened her exploration of Ukrainian identity, turning her camera lens towards its younger generations. The photographs capture Ukrainian youth living in a suspended state: situated between a vanishing childhood and an uncertain adulthood. Yemchuk’s work took on greater meaning after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. “People have to know who we are, not the war; they need to see what we are and who we are fighting for”, she explains.
Yemchuk’s sixth and most recent photo book, Malanka (2024), captures the vibrant folk festival of the same name, celebrated by ethnic Romanians in western Ukraine. Across her projects, Yemchuk’s imagery changes form – melding documentary spontaneity with painterly staging, reportage with dream. Her films share the same fluidity, drawing on influences from directors like Federico Fellini, Sergei Parajanov, and David Lynch. Works like Mabel, Betty, & Bette (2021) intertwine constructed narratives with personal histories, testing the boundaries between cinematic and photographic storytelling. Despite their dreamy elements, her images remain honest. As opposed to capturing “truth” in the most literal sense, she reveals the historical realities and private fictions we carry within us.
Return and Transformation
Yemchuk also takes a markedly feminine approach towards her subjects. She captures the duality of women, depicting them as delicate and resilient, sensual and foreboding. “I want to show them as they are, powerful yet vulnerable”, she often says. Her female protagonists are not symbols or objects to be decoded, but presences to be felt – they straddle the space between youth and adulthood, tradition and progress, intimacy and distance.
This year, Yemchuk presents her most ambitious project to date: Ithaca / Іtака at Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, co-curated by Kolektiv Cité Radieuse and The Naked Room Kyiv. Drawing on never-before-seen photographs from the 1990s and 2000s, selections from her past monographs, moving images from early and recent films, and a new series shot in Kyiv and Lviv between 2024 and 2025, Ithaca represents a diary of Yemchuk’s personal and artistic odyssey.
The title reflects the layered meanings of “Ithaca” – from “the place of genuine origin” in ancient Greek, to “the colony” in Phoenician – and its mythical associations with Penelope. In Yemchuk’s hands, Ithaca becomes a metaphor for Ukraine: a place both fixed and changing, bound by tradition yet redefined by resilience and determination. In the context of the ongoing war, the exhibition stands as a testament to a homeland under siege. Yemchuk’s work becomes both a record of loss and an affirmation of endurance.
In Ithaca, the artist’s long engagement with Ukrainian youth, female archetypes, and the line between tradition and transformation finds its most layered expression. The exhibition represents a return and a departure – an exploration of the spaces we inhabit when belonging is complicated and home exists as much in memory as in place.
