Lviv–God’s Will

This story is about those of us to whom life just happens – when the connection between cause and consequence is no longer coherent.

I am documenting a naïve visual subculture of public space, which has become widespread throughout Ukraine after the post-Soviet period of globalization. For me, a central peculiarity of the culture is the absence of conscious author. The objects of the city environment are formed by the accidental interaction of unrelated people, by mistakes, destructions, wild vegetation. Finally, by no one. Everything is God’s will.

All the objects collected in the book were photographed without any interference on my part. However, in most photographs, I сut off the background in order to isolate the subjects from all the chaos usually surrounding them.

Lviv – Bozha Volya (literally God’s Will) is a bus route connecting a city with a small village lost in the forests on the very border of the European Union.

In Ukrainian, “Bozha Volya” is derived from the same root word as madness.

The name is an artistic image and has nothing in common with geography.

Viacheslav Poliakov (В’ячеслав Поляков, 1986) was born in Kherson, Ukraine, but now lives in Lviv. In 2007 he obtained a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from Kherson State University. His work was recently exhibited in ShowOFF at Krakow Photomonth. He’s also the finalist of Grand Prix Fotofestiwal 2017 in Lodz, Poland.