Bitter Honeydew

Winner of the 2014 European Publishers Award for Photography, Bitter Honeydew depicts the lives of those who run roadside stalls in Ukraine – ‘tochka’, where they sell fruit according to the season and often far more. ‘Tochka’ is a general Ukrainian term for a sales point, but can sometimes also refer to prostitution. The merchants, many of them coming from Azerbaijan and Georgia mix with locals and live close to their makeshift emporiums in tents and trailers. They work and live either alone or with their families. A microcosm of very different people with a common goal: they want to make money. But Golovchenko’s images talk also about his compassion for these uprooted men and women, about the bitterness in their lives.