Provincial gigolos and leopard-clad ladies, rigorous businesswomen and young soldiers. You can meet all possible (and often impossible) kinds of characters while commuting on a train in Ukraine.

“Ukrzaliznytsia” (named for the Ukrainian railway system) is a series of staged fashion-centric images by Julie Poly shot riding trains around the country on the Kiev Central Railway. “When I was growing up," says Poly, "I dreamt about art school, but as with typical Ukrainian family views on life, my parents were not very happy about it – so they said that I should go to the Railway Academy.” She moved to Kharkiv to study at the academy and became interested in photography spending summers working as a conductor on the trains. The project depicts certain types of Ukrainian passengers as well as stereotypes about them, with the boundaries between reality and fiction being completely erased. The images were eventually exhibited in advertising kiosks around the train stations.

Ukrzaliznytsia is published by Ditto London.