Jan Brykczynski: “Boiko” – Exploring the Rural Reality of Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains

Jan Brykczyński (b. 1979) is a photographer who often focuses on European rural regions in his work as well as on the complex relationship between man and nature. In 2014 he published his first book, Boiko, on rural life in the Ukrainian Carpathian mountains.

Poland –

Those Boikos are the most mysterious tribe the length and breadth of the Carpathians. No-one else is quite so troublesome. The Boikos are a little mute. They are incapable of talking about themselves.

They are so vivid, when you are among them, yet become slippery, like their waters, when you try to somehow define them.

They have so many objects and gestures that have disappeared everywhere else, and they have so little of everything that is already everywhere.

Taras Prokhas’ko, transl. Uilleam Blacker



Screen Shot 2015-10-19 at 6.54.10 PM


A Boiko village in the Ukrainian Carpathian Mountains fit my idea of the rural life in its primal form perfectly. I found myself in a world where the events have magical causes, where white magic confronts black magic and good struggles with evil – in a world I knew only from the fairy tales I was told as a child.

 

The BOIKO book Photography feature – Jan Brykczynski was self-published in 2014.

Related Posts

The Plight of the Pathans – Hossein Fatemi

Afghanistan – Afghanistan used to be a peaceful country, popular with hippies coming from Europe and South East Asia. But ...

Andy Rocchelli: “Russian Interiors” – Intimate Portrait of Women in their Private Spaces

Italy –  Andy started to travel to Russia in 2010; there he spent a considerable amount of time working asa ...

What Remains – Sarker Protick

Bangladesh –  It was in the afternoon, I was sitting on my grandpa’s couch. The door was slightly open and ...

Scoffing Pig : Nozomi Iijima

Japan –  I grew up as a farmer’s daughter. My home was sandwiched between a pigpen and a farmhouse and ...

Colin Pantall on Ken Grant “No Pain Whatsoever”

England –   ‘It began as a way of remembering the craftspeople and laborers of my adolescence,’ writes Ken Grant ...

Ricardo Cases: El porqué de las naranjas (Why Oranges)

Spain –  I have seen a river in Paris / next to the grey tower / I have seen an ...

Ren Hang

THIS STORY CONTAINS EXPLICIT CONTENT China – Photographer and poet, Ren Hang was born in Changchun, in northeast China in ...

Koodankulam : In My Backyard – Amirtharaj Stephen

India – ‘Colorful Guizhou’, the 6th Photo China Original International Photographic Exhibition opened in the Guizhou Province of China on ...

Just Like Us : Inside Iran’s Apartments By Palash Krishna Mehrotra

Iran – Iranian Living Room is the first of a series of editorial projects self-published by Fabrica, a think tank ...