Roberto Vitali, born in 1994 in a small city of northern Italy, is self-taught photographer with a passion for documentary and street photography and is currently studying interdisciplinary research and studies on Eastern Europe at the University of Bologna. Since his teenage years he has always been fascinated by the eastern European countries, especially with Russia and Ukraine.
When he moved to Berlin at the age of 19 he started to explore and get a closer look on eastern Europe and its past, this was thanks to the fact that he has been living on the east side of the city, well known for its soviet heritage. During his stay in Berlin he got into film photography thanks to some friends of him who were shooting film and after a relative of mine gave him one of his old film cameras his journey with analog photography started and kept growing ever since.
About ‘A Ukrainian Journal’ – words by Roberto Vitali:
When I travel eastwards, I always get inspired and euphoric about the things that could happen, the people that I could meet on my way and the stories that I could tell once I come back home. In August 2019 I travelled from Budapest to Kyiv, passing through Lviv. Before the journey started, I had just finished to read “A Russian Journal” by John Steinbeck, this book had a big influence on my work and on my approach to my upcoming travel. I wanted to capture the way of living of the ordinary people in Ukraine, I wanted to freeze a frame of their everyday lives. “A Ukrainian Journal” is photographic series of portraits and street scenes that resemble what I came across during my travel in Ukraine.
