Miron Zownir: The Invisible

Photographs from Moscow and the Ukraine

Miron Zownir

The BrotfabrikGalerie presents photographs by the German-Ukrainian artist Miron Zownir, whose images of Moscow from 1995, shown now for the first time in Berlin, document the hardship of post-Soviet social erosion, when 300,000 people were living on the streets under subhuman standards. It was a state of social emergency largely ignored in the public eye that Zownir captured in realistic images of beggars, invalids, and addicts.

The photographs from the Ukraine, taken in 2012, record the first signs of the political upheaval that would seize the country in 2014: homeless youths in Odessa, the conditions in a children’s home in Czernowitz, the Maidan in Kiev.

Zownir, born 1953 in Germany, is one of the most radical photographic chroniclers of the present day. His ruthless black-and-white images lend visual form to the lives of outsiders. They should be read as a call for social reflection on global crimes against human rights. These timeless images