“This project traces the struggle between democratic and autocratic forces, where the promise of freedom constantly collides with the pull of domination,” photographer Robin Hinsch writes. “It lingers on the fragile thresholds between openness and control, hope and fear. At its core lies the question of what futures can still be imagined in the shadow of this conflict.”
Robin Hinsch was first drawn to Ukraine after reading an article in German magazine Der Spiegel. He became intrigued by the article’s description of the then President Viktor Yanukovych as “the new dictator between East and West.” His deep interest in the country compelled him to return many times over more than a decade to photograph both the land and the people he encountered.
The photographs in the book show landscapes obscured by mist, or covered in snow, or soaked through with rain. Animals like cats, dogs, horses, and a bear appear throughout. The people in the photographs are not randomly placed, but rather positioned carefully in their surrounding environment, whether it be homes, fields, workplaces, or ruins. None of his compositions are by chance.
Robin Hinsch’s images are not exactly photojournalism, but not propaganda, and not overtly political. The work exists in the area between documentary, fine art photography and storytelling. The fact that the photographer started to document Ukraine before the Maidan Uprising (which started in 2013) and the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014 (which led to the current situation in Ukraine) complicates the work. As Julian Stallabrass points out in the text for the book: “So Lonely Are All the Bridges is not a war book, exactly, although it cannot now be seen except through the perspective of the current conflict.”
Without any titles, descriptions, or dates accompanying the photographs, time and place blur together. Only at the end of the book do you get the details about when and where a photograph was made. But you also get Hinsch’s notes interspersed with the titles, adding a deeper context to the photographs, and the people, places, and things within.
Within those notes Hinsch also references the film Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky, in which linear storytelling is removed, and replaced by a fragmented narrative and allowing experiences from different times to exist together mixed with dreams, and memories. “Through its meditative atmosphere, Andrei Tarkovsky‘s Mirror cultivates a reflective space where silence, sound, and imagery unfold slowly, encouraging deep contemplation,” Hinsch writes in his notes. “This immersive quality transforms each scene into an emotional landscape.”
As the photographs switch back and forth between black and white with color, which are themselves printed with a subdued color palate, it further emphasizes the differences in time and place. Past and present blur together, with no indication directly of what the future will hold. Stallabass writes: “This book suggests, at least, a time in which the current war will be added to the strata of time and memory, and less starkly black-and-white thoughts and feelings may once again become possible.”
Lonely Are All the Bridges is published by GOST and will be released in February of 2026. The book can be pre-ordered for 55€.
