Behold the child.
Time: September 1998. The joy of independence collides with an economic crisis. The newly rich and the homeless. Openness to the West, entanglement with the East.
Place: Khreshchatyk, the heart of Kyiv. Soon it will become an arena for revolutions: the Orange Revolution, followed by the Revolution of Dignity; for civic protests against the annexation of Crimea; and for national solidarity in the face of Russian aggression.
A child on the street, crouching down. He wants to be invisible, to disappear from the sight of adults, to step out of the path of violence, out of the line of fire; he wants to slip free from the snares of a fate blind to suffering.
Homeless. Orphaned from his family, cast onto the pavement by History.
His own history, written with a lowercase h, seems to weigh nothing, as easy to blow away as the body of someone after many days of starvation.
Unexpectedly, the photographer captures him.
His lens blurs silhouettes in the glare of headlights, glides past monuments and elegant salons. His focus is on fragments of unvarnished life, on the threads of individual destinies and on the way they can intertwine in an impulse of rebellion against the verdicts of History.
He knows how to give names to the nameless, weight to the peripheries, and dignity to the enslaved.
Behold the child-human.
Place of birth: Ukraine.
Caught in a crouch, seeking shelter from yet another blow from History’s boot; between the legs of adults in trousers pressed to razor-sharp creases, between the shadows of empire and tyranny.
And yet everything around him is merely a fragment, faceless and meaningless.
It is through him that the axis mundi runs; in his face, the fate of the world, our future, is concentrated.
The homeless boy from Kyiv’s Khreshchatyk is a child of his time, our child.
With both hands clasped around his head, he instinctively shields it from the blow, while at the same time holding the globe in his care, anxious for it, as though its next turn depended on him.
His eyes tell us so — wide open, mature beyond his years.
In them, one can almost hear the words of Czesław Miłosz from his poem Child of Europe:
“Already a generation is being born, deadly serious,
Taking literally what we accepted with laughter.”
Behold the human being — an innocent child.
Detained by the police. He is to be placed in a juvenile detention centre.
He needs the understanding and closeness of people of words who will lead him out of the world’s orphanage and place him at its centre; people who will give a name to his individual fate and a voice to the story of his life.
He needs historians who will care for the truth of his history, written with a lowercase h, and discover within it the strength of rebellion against the tyranny of History.
Krzysztof Czyżewski
Ołeksandr Hładiełov is a living legend of Ukrainian documentary photography. He is renowned for his black-and-white images, made with a Leica camera. His photographic testimonies have served international organisations supporting the struggle for human rights, including MSF, The Global Fund, WHO, UNAIDS and UNICEF.
He has received, among other distinctions, the Grand Prix at Ukrpressphoto-97, the Hasselblad Prize at the European Photography competition in Vevey, Switzerland (1998), and the Mother Jones 2001 Medal of Excellence and Moving Walls 2002 OSI in New York.
He was born in Legnica, Poland, into the family of a Soviet officer. He studied optics at Kyiv Polytechnic. He taught himself photography and began working as an independent photojournalist in 1985.
He travelled extensively, from Central Asia through the Caucasus, Central Europe and the countries of the West, all the way to Africa. He reported from armed conflicts in Moldova, where he was wounded, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya and Ukraine, where he was wounded again.
Since 1996, he has focused primarily on long-term documentary projects addressing the exploitation of children, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, drug addiction and conditions in post-Soviet prisons.
Hładiełov’s camera operates within a field of trust — through intimate contact with people who are rarely seen, or who are usually shown only from the outside.
This allows him to maintain strong, lasting relationships with his subjects — bonds that extend far beyond the frame.
As a result, his photographs are not merely testimonies about others, but testimonies shared with them.
The 2024 film Hładiełow. Focus on Eternity, directed by Ksenija Krawcowa, received the award for Best Documentary at the Odesa International Film Festival.
Ecce Homo-Infans / Behold the Child-Human is an exhibition consisting of a single photograph. The artist donated it to Borderland with a dedication to Marci Shore and Timothy Snyder.
Its caption reads:
“A homeless boy detained by the police waits to be transported to a juvenile detention centre. Khreshchatyk, Kyiv, September 1998.”