Maarten de Kok
The silent border of Ukraine
In March 2014 before the happening of the Crimea “referendum” I travelled along the political “border” between West and South Ukraine, from Savran, trough Kryvyi Rih, Dnepropetrovsk to Poltava. I took photos of the landscape and I interviewed (with the help of an interpreter) and took portraits of people I met on my way to get to know what they thought about what is happening in Ukraine. This became a story of a divided land and of simple people with strong opinions about their country.
Maarten de Kok
I have been captured by photography since I was a child leaving in the countryside (Drente). My first pictures focused on people around me, just daily life shoots in the farm house. During the Academia my interest started focusing mostly on East Europe, one of my frist story was related to the flooding of a small town in Romania. After graduating as documentary photographer at the Academia Minerva (Groningen NL) I have immediately started my own company as freelance photographer. By that time my interests towards East Europe grow even more and brought me to travel several times to Ukraine and Bulgaria. During these years I was mostly interested in showing with my series the happening of facts. Recently my work has developed in more conceptual way and I am busy finding a way to tell stories of single people, focusing on details rather than events.