Ukrainian art director Eugenia Skvarska shares her world for an intimate new publishing series

Earlier this year, in a studio in London, artist Ben McLaughlin found himself in a room full of Ukrainians. There were boxers from a local gym, a grandmother with her family, a Ukrainian make-up artist and a group pulled together from the city's Ukrainian community by casting director Julia Gilmour. Behind them hung enormous prints of landscapes shot 1,500 miles away, along the Dnipro river.

Dnipro Fotostudiia, a 38-page portfolio made over a single weekend, sits at the centre of Dnipro, The Plunging Shore, the first edition of Unofficial, a new publishing series McLaughlin launches this month through Officialzine. Each edition will be made with an artist or image-maker creating work about the place they grew up, with a deliberate focus on places that don't register as cultural centres. 'I almost find the more obscure the place, the better,' McLaughlin says.

Up first is Eugenia Skvarska. The Ukrainian stylist and art director grew up in Kyiv, on the banks of the Dnipro, and after Russia destroyed the Kakhovka Dam in 2023, she felt an urgency to document the river. 'It's impossible to separate it from the history of Ukraine,' she says.

She travelled it between the sites of her childhood with photographer Kalpesh Lathigra in a tiny Smart car donated by a concrete company: guiding, driving, translating, telling the stories of the places they passed through.

The landscapes they came back with, shot on large-format film, are full of summer light. 'A lot of work I see from this region is not bleak, but it's cold,' McLaughlin says. 'I hope this project turns that perception on its head.'

Skvarska is more direct. 'We knew this project shouldn't be about documenting destruction. Kalpesh has photographed wars before, but this time we wanted to photograph the soul of the country. The war is still present, but only through subtle details: anti-tank hedgehogs, traces of grief, or a quiet sense of uncertainty in the background.'

She describes her boyfriend's mother spending a night in a bomb shelter, then the next afternoon at the river among families and friends. 'People are constantly trying to hold on to moments of normalcy,' she says.

Rather than presenting the road-trip material as straight documentary, McLaughlin printed Lathigra's landscapes as vast studio backdrops and staged the London portrait shoot against them, with Skvarska styling the cast in garments by young Ukrainian designers, alongside vintage clothing sent from Kyiv by her assistant. 'I wasn't interested in creating costumes, or a romantic image of Ukrainian identity,' she says. 'I wanted the styling to feel honest and contemporary, while still carrying traces of memory and home.'

The portraits sit at the heart of the book, bookended by the landscapes and combining the two collaborators' hands into a single visual language.

The format is difficult to place, which is the point. 'It's not a magazine, but it's not an artist book. It sits in this kind of funny space between,' says McLaughlin, who spent his early career making artist books, then commissioning for magazines.

Unofficial is, in part, a response to what he sees as a glut of both: too many photography books, too many image-led independent magazines with no tone of voice. His answer is to extract the single story and give it everything, an edition at a time. Each is printed in a run of 450 by Grafiche Veneziane and the production shifts to fit the project - an insert, a poster, or a piece of tipped-in ephemera. 'It's not neat,' he says, approvingly.

What began as a set of scans took two years to edit, in printed-out sessions with Adam Murray, a curator and course leader of the MA Fashion Image programme at Central Saint Martins (where Skvarska first began the project as his student) and a close collaborator throughout. Across the book, the river resurfaces in unexpected places - in a painting hanging in a photographed interior, in wedding-venue curtains that gather like waves. 'There's a strength in taking a bit of time,' McLaughlin says. 'I don't think the project would have got to this point without it.'

Two editions a year are planned, and the next two are already in motion. Though McLaughlin is keeping them under wraps, he hints that one draws on a small-town photographic archive spanning half a century. Future editions may loosen the format further still: he's interested in hometowns curated by contributors who aren't image-makers at all. The series grew partly out of conversations about authenticity, and about how often the image of a place has been made by people who aren't from it. It’s what he hopes every edition will share: work made from the inside, in places the world rarely looks.