Portraits from the 80s

Bratkov’s portraits of the 1980s form a raw and incisive visual archive of a generation suspended between the collapse of Soviet ideological certainties and the emergence of a new, undefined reality. Created before the artist became widely associated with the Kharkiv photography school of the 1990s, these early works already reveal the hallmarks of his later practice: an acute psychological intensity, a quasi-anthropological attention to the human body, and an unapologetically direct gaze at the social margins.