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Documentary

Maxim Dondyuk

Photographer

Maxim Dondyuk

THIS IS WAR

This photos are from the project about armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine. I spent 2 months with Pro-Russians in Donbass and saw how counterrevolution was born there. After, I was from the Ukrainian army side.
During the breaks, I started photographing barren landscapes of Donbas, which fascinated with its silence and static, but at the same time frightened. Areas that had recently witnessed bloody clashes, now stood abandoned in an absolute silence. It seemed I had got into a lonely ghost world, slowly I started forgetting the machine-gun fire, mortar attacks, bruised wounded bodies. But stress didn’t gone, it was a lurking silence, and you couldn’t know what she was hiding. The traces that left the war, the smell of fear, destroyed hopes, hatred, pain, again and again brought me back to reality. It is very close, and it is not going to go away ...

Maxim Dondyuk

Maxim Dondyuk, b. 1983. Visual Artist, Photographer
His works were exhibited internationally at the Musée d’Art Moderne (Paris), Somerset House (London), MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts (Rome), Stadtisches Museum im Kornhouse (Germany), International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum (Geneva), the Biennale of Photography in Bogota (Colombia), among others. 
He is a finalist of the Prix Pictet ‘Disorder’ Photography Prize, International Photographer of the Year in Lucie Awards, finalist of the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography, winner of the Ville de Perpignan Remi Ochlik Award, Magnum Photos competition ‘30 under 30’ for emerging documentary photographers, to name a few. Maxim has been awarded an artist residency Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France and received NOOR-Nikon Masterclass in Documentary Photography in Bucharest, Romania.
His works are in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Photography (Colombia), Benaki Museum (Greece), Museum of The History of Ukraine in World War II (Ukraine) and private collections.
His projects were featured in GUP, British Journal of Photography, TIME, New York Times, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, STERN, Rolling Stone, Polka, 6Mois, Paris Match, Le Monde, PDN, Bloomberg Businessweek, and others.