Behold the beach season in Odessa, Ukraine, where all your beach needs are attended to by an ever-adapting class of beach-side vendors on the beach! Want some hot boiled corn? Take a picture with a monkey? Buy some salty fish from the one that looks like Kate Bush the militant sea-captain? Pet a snake. Balloons, also. There are balloons.
Beach time! Beach time! Beach time!
These photos just popped up at English Russia but they need to learn to credit photo series already, damn. Photographer Olena Slyesarenko on her “Small Economies” series:
This project examines the quickly changing commercial landscape of Ukraine and its impact on the work force. By moving indoors, into corporate supermarkets and malls, it is becoming more Westernized and homogeneous. The archive of images of street vendors and other small, unlicensed businesses records an element of Ukrainian visual culture as it disappears. Not without irony, the beach portraits capture a black-market economy in the sunshine.
