The Stops. Ukraine’s Roadside Architecture. Yevhen Nikiforov, Artem Chekh

For 10 years, while traveling around Ukraine, independent photographer and researcher of Ukrainian monumental art Yevhen Nikiforov documented special places of waiting and meeting scattered along the roadsides - bus stops. Of the more than a thousand unique architectural objects found and photographed, the publication included about two hundred of the most interesting images.

The sequence of photographs conveys both the architectural diversity of the stops, the routine flow of human lives around them, and the familiar feeling of sweet excitement associated with the road. Bus stops, which are both the beginning and the end of the journey, are also a place of waiting, contemplation of everyday life and the intersection of human destinies.

In his autobiographical lyrical essay, Ukrainian writer and military serviceman Artem Chekh reflects on the road as a metaphor for growth, childhood, loneliness, love and death. He describes personal and collective memory as living matter, depicts the landscape as an inner world, and sensitively tells about the journey as a ceaseless dynamic state of our lives.

Some of the stops shown in this book have already been absorbed by time, everyday negligence, war, and temporary occupation. However, photography, as an opportunity to immortalize a changing and fragile reality, forever preserves the image of native, familiar, accustomed, and sometimes forgotten and lost places.