Azov Horizons:
Starting in 2019, "Azov Horizons" is a long-term photographic project exploring the territories around the Sea of Azov, a little-known but highly strategic northern extension of the Black Sea. Once an internal sea of the USSR, the Sea of Azov was shared between Ukraine and Russia for several decades. Since the occupation of Crimea in 2014, followed by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the sea and all its ports are now under Russian control. With its yearly chapters that allow the time of history to unfold in all its complexity, the "Azov Horizons" project takes the eye in search of both the roots and the visible traces of the conflict. With an approach that blends symbolism and documentary, and through the prism of summer images that dissonance with the usual iconography of the post-Soviet world, the project explores the backstage of a geographical area now engulfed in the violent struggle for control of southern Ukraine, while evoking the transformations underway in the societies of both countries, one sinking into bellicose authoritarianism, the other struggling for survival.
For Chapter III, in the summer of 2022, Wack traveled the entire Russian coast of the Sea of Azov, from Taganrog, a port city close to the Ukrainian border, to Russian-occupied Crimea. A year earlier, the photographer had devoted Chapter II to the Ukrainian coast and, in particular, to the city of Marioupol, which, a few months later, would suffer the horror and devastation of Putin's war like no other, to the point of almost complete annihilation. In the summer of 2023, for Chapter IV, Wack returned to Ukraine, as close as possible to the Sea of Azov. He visited the battered regions of Odessa, Mykolaev and Kherson, documenting the destruction caused by Russian occupation and the country's fight for sovereignty.
Influenced by the American tradition of road photography, the photographer favors the detour and wandering over the journalistic approach, in order to give the territory and its singularities, rather than the event, the upper hand in the narrative that builds up over the images.
