Reimagining Female Identity in a Ukrainian Orphanage
From the book Internat, Carolyn Drake/Magnum Photos
More than a decade ago, on a Fulbright fellowship in Ukraine, the artist Carolyn Drake found herself outside Ternopil, a small city on the banks of the Seret River. Her hosts led her to a forest on the edge of a suburb, where a large, half-century-old building stood bearing a small nondescript sign, which translated to “Petrykhiv Children’s Home,” or Internat, the title of her just-published photo book. Away from society at large, among a staff of women and one male director, the orphaned girls who lived there formed their own community, an all-female family engaged in the routine of daily life and chores, and an instinctive, if naive, curiosity about the outside world.
In the intervening decade, Drake traveled to Central Asia for her project and to the western frontier of China to make the photographs, drawings, and embroidery that When she returned to Ukraine, in 2014, she expected that the girls she had met would have left the orphanage. But they were still there, suddenly grown up.
