Danila Tkachenko’s Fascinating Portraits of Men Living in the Woods

The images in Russian photographer Danila Tkachenko’s series, Escape, express an undeniable desire to get away from it all. Quiet portraits of men living outside society amidst the verdant green of the woods, interspersed with the trees and the shelter they’ve made out of them, tell us not just that life is quiet out here, but that there is life to be found in these woods.

Tkachenko writes, “For me [the wilderness] is a place where I can hide and feel [like] the real me—my true self, out of any social context.” She asks, “how do we remain ourselves when we are enveloped in and dictated by a social framework?” The idea of ‘escape’ could be a central theme here, but Tkachenko’s images allude to something more than that, something more primal, something that asks us to tap into our real selves, asks who we are at our core, and who we really become when we are ‘set free,’ again.

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