Photo project "Bench"

Subject bench is not new in the history of photography. Almost all well-known photographers of the genre with great pleasure that shot and shoot and the life on the bench. Sculptors turn benches in monuments in almost prizvedeniya jewelry. And remember the cartoons Bidstrup Herluf ... Bench - is a model of the world. Everything revolves around the benches. Sick of love thirst couples who have nowhere to go, looking for the bench; alcoholics and homeless without any benches not imagine my life - for them it is the house and the table, and toilet and a bed; children are constantly breaking benches; Students on the benches doglatyvayut missing knowledge before exams; old men on benches live their last days. Eugene Kotenko chose the bench than on the street, avenue, or not in the park. He found it in his backyard - unpretentious, izlatannoe, scarred building, once painted in the blue color of the sky by the dispensation, then to red, or vice versa, is constantly recovering the apocalypse. It's not even a bench, a bench, ie something absurd, ridiculous around which always mountains of cigarette butts, lushpaek from seeds, bottles and other debris. It's funny, at one point appeared beside her urn. At first she was dull gray color, then it is not very carefully painted. Garbage, however, the earth has not decreased. Urn periodically disappears and returns.
23 Photo © Eugene Kotenko

Kotenko four years filming everything that happened on the bench. The result was secretly peeped theater, Shakespeare almost grotesque, glow and sharpness. And it involves not only people, but also a dog, a cat ... The Misfits, hungry animals. Where life and death are sitting side by side, rubbing against each other, over each other laugh, scoff. The director - the irrepressible "upivets" Bacchus cheers her performances for one spectator (the photographer) in which, however, is dominated by a scornful tone. This mood is passed and the man with the camera, which is ironic tone-disgust. Peeped effect enhances the viewer's curiosity, which is attached to voyeurism, experiences pleasant feelings inherent vuaeristam, from doing something not quite right, is permitted, on the penetration into someone else's secret. Kotenko course provocateur.

Jack is not just shooting, and investigated a social stratum of the population of Ukraine. The bench had also turned in an image wound that tears itself, deepens, annoying. Photographer watching everything that happens on a bench top models look god, entertain and calmly contemplating the situation. It seems that it is here, he put a bench and forced the photographer to join the life on it, once again instructing us that people turned out from the earth: he is "born of the mud."