The Unhurried Work of Hrystia Kaminska

Most of what I do professionally demands volume. Attention is finite and everything is competing for it—louder, sharper, more immediate, no time to look twice. After a while you start generating the noise without thinking about it. It just becomes the default setting.

Which is probably why I keep getting stopped by work like Hrystia Kaminska’s. She’s an eighteen-year-old photographer from Ukraine, shooting under the name Kosmodisk, and her images are the opposite of all that. Soft focus, muted colors, compositions that don’t demand anything from you. There’s always something slightly unresolved in the frame—a story that trails off before it arrives anywhere. The closest comparison I have is an unexpected summer rain: warm, brief, slightly disorienting in the best way.

I can feel myself drifting toward pure sentimentality here and I’m going to stop before I go completely over the edge. The photos are better than anything I’d write about them anyway. And yes, after all that delicate restraint, this journal is now in urgent need of some tits and cock. Balance in all things.