Gidropark

Ukrainian-born, Brooklyn-based photographer and painter Yelena Yemchuk is most commonly known for her fashion and portrait photographs, which have appeared in Italian and Japanese Vogue, V, the New Yorker and The New York Times. Yet her personal work, which she usually shoots on a 35-mm camera while traveling around the globe, has rarely been seen. The photographs in this book were taken over three summers between 2005 and 2008 at Gidropark, an old amusement park (Yemchuk has called it "an Eastern European version of Coney Island") in Kiev that she often visited when she was growing up. Amid the park's beaches, sports grounds and woodlands, leisure becomes curiously otherworldly, with picnicking families stripped down to their bathing suits (or even less) taking on a Fellini-esque quality in Yemchuk's wistful shots.