Spare focuses on the abandoned and underprivileged adolescents and children who struggle to survive in post-Communist Ukraine.
Ukraine gained its independence after the collapse of the Soviet Union and inherited many destructive social, economic and moral problems from the totalitarian regime. In its first eight years of independence Ukraine has suffered a depression that has led to a rise in the cost of living and the impoverishment of a majority of the population.
The government offers no support for poor families and single parents, so many children are forced out onto the streets to fend for themselves. The youngest children are three or four years old. Some children continue to live with their parents, many of whom are unemployed and either drug addicts or alcoholics, who force their children into the streets to beg for money.
The rest of the children live on the streets, in basements, entrances, casings of heating pipes, or in other industrial objects. They earn their living by begging and stealing. Many are sexually abused. By age eight most use alcohol and tobacco. By age nine, many inhale mind-altering toxic agents. Some are involved in the drug trade– either as pushers, collectors of raw materials, or as testers of homemade drug concoctions (mainly opiates). Some even become intravenous drug addicts before they are 10.
Ukraine deals with such children in the same manner as the Soviets did: those it catches are forced into secret institutions -- barracks-type buildings and asylums. No real statistics exist on how many children are swept off the streets, but every year the Ministry of Internal Affairs detains about 20,000 abandoned children throughout Ukraine. Those who end up in asylums often just escape back to life on the streets.
Born July 30, 1956, Aleksandr Glyadyelov is an independent photojournalist who graduated from Kiev Polytechnic Institute in 1980 and began his career as a professional photographer in 1989. He has collaborated with both Ukrainian and foreign mass media such as UNICEF and Medicines Sans Frontiers.
Throughout the 1990s Glyadyelov worked in several states of the former USSR. In 1992 he was wounded while covering the conflict in the Transdnister region of Moldova.
Glyadyelov has received awards from the Ukrpressphoto including the Grand Prix in 1997. In 1998 he won the Hasselblad award at the European Photography contest in Vevey, Switzerland. He was a participant in the international exhibition Ten Years After, a project that opened in Prague in 1999 and explores the changes in the post-Communist world.
In addition to Spare,he is currently working on an expansive reportage of the HIV epidemic in Ukraine. He refers to his work as "humanitarian photojournalism."
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