Anastasia Taylor-Lind’s Maidan: Portraits from Ukraine’s Black Square

“When Anastasia Taylor-Lind arrived in central Kiev on 01 February, Independence Square was under siege, surrounded by police loyal to the government. Rising tensions culminated in the worst day of violence on 20 February and the following day President Yanokovych fled Ukraine. In all, three months of protests resulted in 112 confirmed dead, and many more missing,” writes Gost, a book imprint that will publish Taylor-Lind portraits of fighters and mourners this coming July. “The ‘fighters’ are identified by their homemade body armour, and the ‘mourners’ by the bunches of flowers they have brought to pay their respects to the dead.”

“It was Larry Towell who suggested that this project should become a book,” Taylor-Lind tells BJP. “We shared an apartment and one day after work in Maidan, about half way through my project he just said: ‘That’d make a good book.’ I was a bit taken aback but it was on my mind from then on, and I started to think about the work being presented in that way as I continued shooting the project. I can’t tell you how precious these images are to me, the people in them, the experience of meeting each fighter and each mourner. When I got home it became clear that the only adequate way to show this work was as a book – editorial is too inadequate, a show too transient.”

Maidan – Portraits from the Black Square from GOST Books on Vimeo.

Maidan: Portraits from the Black Square will be published by Gost books in July 2014. For more details and to order the book, visit the Gost website.