“One day a doctor came and said: ‘Sir, you shouldn’t tell us you are photographer, there is a queue of six doctors in a corridor now and they want you to photograph them. If you like, I will tell them that you don’t feel well.’ ‘Of course not,’ I replied, ‘Let’s go!’”
The images Khludeyev took on his camera have a strange, hallucinatory quality. The image of medical staff assembled in front of the camera looks like it could be a remnant from the clean-up of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster – their protective suits keeping out a different kind of invisible assailant, while the light leak around the pictures edges adds to their eerie quality.
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The hospital’s gloomy surroundings also add to the mood. “The hospital I was at should have been renovated right before quarantine, and they decided to delay it, so they could use it as Covid hospital,” says Khludeyev. He processed the film and digital images so that they had a similar look. “I wanted to show a true story, that Covid is not a joke, nor fake and a real danger. It was a serious fight for life, so I tried to correspond that in a style of photographs as well.”
Khludeyev says that, five year later, and having made a full recovery, he looks at the images with “nostalgia and gratefulness. These doctors and medics were volunteers, they literally risked their lives for us… Some were teachers, students, some had to interrupt vacations. The did a great thing and saved thousands of human lives. I truly appreciate and thank them and, all as well as my wife, my friends and my parents who supported me a lot.