Over the course of six years, artist Michal Chelbin gained unprecedented access in order to photograph male and female inmates in seven prisons across Ukraine and Russia. Not wanting to be influenced by knowledge of her subjects' crimes, she focused on the complicated gaze of the prisoners, completing her sessions before asking about the details of anyone's sentence. Sometimes waiting hours for masks to be let down, Chelbin patiently sought expressions that transcended individual situations and spoke of universal truths beyond the confining walls of the jail cell.
The title, Sailboats and Swans, refers to the bucolic, unintentionally sardonic murals found on the prison walls amplifying the numbing reality of incarceration.
Chelbin comments: “As much as the prison for adult males troubled me, the juvenile prison for boys was hell on earth. I could sense the terror in their eyes from the moment I entered. They are constantly being watched. Boys who stole a cell phone in an adolescent prank are trying to survive next to boys who have raped and slaughtered. Being an adolescent is hard enough, and to be in prison at such a difficult age is almost unimaginable.
“The girls’ prison was another shock. Unlike the stories I heard, it was almost a haven, a place where girls who committed awful felonies are being kept safe from the dangers of the outside world, not the other way around. In the women’s prison I saw 22-year-olds next to 70-year-olds, women from the age of ‘maybe one day’ next to the age of ‘no hope at all.'”
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