Yelena Yemchuk is a Ukrainian-born photographer, whose illustrious career crosses the fields of music and fashion photography, photojournalism and video. Based in New York and a graduate of Parsons School for Design, Yelena has been integral to the formation of the aesthetic vision of the Smashing Pumpkins, through her personal and professional involvement with their frontman Billy Corgan through the late 1990s and early 2000s. The power and melancholy of this rock supergroup has been translated with high emotion through Yelena’s lens with her blend of intimacy and alienation – the sense of connection with the eyes and proximity of her subjects that is offset by her dream-like settings.
Working with both colour and black and white film, Yelena’s style has developed not only through a technical aptitude and natural eye, but through a long journey – a pilgrimage that spanned several years and has taken her across the globe photographing personal interactions in ethnic, rural and urban life.
One series from Yelena’s travels has been resurrected in Yohji Yamamoto’s A#2, five images taken in the Ukraine of young holiday-makers at the sea and in the countryside. The serious gazes of the children seem amiss in their recreational surroundings, and gives a haunting quality to the soft, black and white images.
“I continue to be interested and inspired by the adolescents in the Ukraine. This is perhaps because I was their age when I last lived there, and I revel in the years I spent in Kiev. Or, perhaps it is just the fact that their eyes seem to have seen so much already at such a young age, almost as if all the years of their nation’s history are held in each ot their expressions.”
