"Azov Horizons", winner of Photo Folio Review 2024 | Patrick Wack
The project “Azov Horizons” by Patrick Wack was selected as the winner of the 2024 Photo Folio Review of the Rencontres d’Arles. His series will be screened during the opening week of the Rencontres d’Arles 2025.
Started in 2019, "Azov Horizons" explores the disputed territories surrounding the Sea of Azov, a northern extension of the Black Sea that crystallizes tensions between Russia and Ukraine. Once an internal sea of the USSR, now an international sea bordered by the two countries, it has become a geostrategic area of dispute following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its de facto control over the Kerch Strait, a key maritime passage revendicated by Ukraine. Whoever controls the strait controls the maritime traffic, allowing Russia to hinder freedom of navigation to the Ukrainian ports of Mariupol and Berdiansk, further tightening the noose around Ukrainian sovereignty. Through annual chapters, the project blends symbolism and documentary. On either side of a front line whose images of muddy trenches are reminiscent of the First World War, these uncluttered horizons bathed in soft light act as metaphors for loss as much as for hope, and the nostalgic gaze of two peoples once indivisible, now tangled in a fratricidal conflict.