In the 2000s, life in Ukraine’s southern port felt exactly as it does in Yelena Yemchuk&rs

In the 2000s, life in Ukraine’s southern port felt exactly as it does in Yelena Yemchuk’s photographs: secret, half-dreaming, magical. 

Yelena Yemchuk’s Odesa: A floating dreamland 

Kyiv photographer Yelena Yemchuk documented the people of Odesa from 2015 to 2019 CREDIT: Yelena Yemchuk

I fell in love in Odesa – and these photos bring back the wild city I knew

I recall the Poppy brand matches, sunbathing on Soviet concrete, gaudy clothes bought at the Seventh-Kilometre Market. I remember the boys being sallow-skinned; the girls, killingly defiant – and everyone being very young or very old, with hardly any middle age between….