The photographer Eugene Kotenko's "bench"

The photographer Eugene Kotenko’s “bench”

UKRAINE For someone, it is a simple bench. For others, it is a table or a bed. Depends on the point of view. Depends on people: there are those who sit or lie down, who talk with the neighbor or read a book, those who eat or drink, who argue or kiss, who stand or fall to the ground drunk.

The young Ukrainian photographer Eugene Kotenko – Женя Котенко – have photographed for four years the same bench, out of the window of his apartment and in front of a government building. Every shot is a little secret stolen from its subjects’s lives. Yes, we see the bench painted of blue and then not, covered by snow in winter, with some green around in spring and under the sun in summer, surrounded by yellow leaves in autumn, near the bin and then far, etc… but the real subject is never the bench, it’s the people who live that place. For this reason we are intrigued, for the intimate and social portrait than each photograph reveals.

Here 20 photos of the “Bench” series. Demonstration of a truth we strongly believe in: in photography, it doesn’t exist a more beautiful and infinite subject than the human being, even in the most banal everyday life. Even in the most insignificant place of the earth.