The series of photographs was taken at the former estate of the landowner Litvarev (Sumy, Ukraine), where the writer Anton Chekhov lived with his family during the summer months of 1888–1889 and first conceived the idea for The Cherry Orchard. Behind the house was a fruit garden, which is partially preserved to this day. Series of 7 photographs. 15 × 20 cm

The artist created this installation near his grandmother’s summer house. He fastened her belongings to the concrete pillars, which serve as symbolic links between earth and heaven. Series of 5 photographs, 1986. Nos. 1–3: 50 × 50 cm; Nos. 4–5: 18 × 24 cm

In these pieces the artist moves freely between photo-collage, conceptual gesture, documentary observation, and poetic anthropology. What unites them is a persistent desire to strip away ideological veneers and expose the fragile, absurd, and deeply human layers beneath everyday Soviet life.

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 unapologeticall