Bird in Flight Prize ’18 Special Nomination Winner: Surveillance

Over two weeks more than 2,000 people took part in the open voting for the best project in the special nomination Panasonic Readers’ Choice Award. As a result, Valentyn Odnoviun’s Surveillance series received the largest number of votes. Bird in Flight publishes the photographs from the project and the author’s commentary.

We would like to remind you that the winner of the main award of the Bird in Flight Prize will be announced on November 1, on the first day of the Photo Kyiv fair.

Valentyn Odnoviun

I shoot the walking yard and prison cell door spyholes in former KGB prisons in Baltic States and Ukraine, Stasi prison in Berlin, Germany and UB prisons in Poland.

These agencies were instruments of political repression of the Soviet regime. Their prison cells became places for political prisoners and objectionable “unwanted” people. The same places were used for similar purposes by the Nazi Gestapo during WWII.

Spyhole is a visual communicative channel which obscured the personality of a prisoner into an object of surveillance, reminding of the everyday life of people that were on both sides of it.

These photos are documentary and subjective at the same time. They embody real traces of events, objects and memories, but also serve as platforms for imagining them in more interpretative form.