Viktor Marushchenko (1946 – 2020) was a Ukrainian photographer, founder of the Marushchenko School of Photography in Kyiv and the Ukrainian 5.6 Photo Magazine. His contributions to photography, especially in documenting Ukrainian culture and history, have been recognised in more than 60 solo and group exhibitions, amongst others the Venice Biennale (2001), as well as in numerous publications.
Marushchenko was born in Novosibirsk, USSR, where his parents had moved from Kyiv during World War II. In 1951, his family returned to Kyiv. Marushchenko graduated from the Vocational School of Radio Electronics and the Institute of Food Industry in Kyiv. He developed an interest in photography in the early 1970s after purchasing his first camera, a Praktica. By the mid-1970s, he was involved in theatrical photography, working in the Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrainka theatres in Kyiv. Therefore, his early archive includes many shots of directors, actors, composers, and musicians. Marushchenko furthered his education by attending the Institute of Journalistic Skills from 1979 to 1981, a program organised by photographer Irina Pap.
From 1980 to 1991, Marushchenko worked as a photojournalist for the newspaper Soviet Culture (Советская культура) in the Ukrainian SSR. In 1989, he temporarily moved to Switzerland and participated, amongst others, in the exhibition 100 Photographers from the East at the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne. While based in Switzerland, Marushchenko participated in numerous photography exhibitions in Switzerland, Germany, France, the US, Canada, Slovakia, Ukraine, and elsewhere.
In 1997, Marushchenko returned to Kyiv and worked for the newspaper Day (День) for two years before becoming a freelance photographer in 1999. From 1999 to 2000, he headed the Kyiv organisation of the National Union of Photographers of Ukraine. In 2001, at the invitation of Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, Marushchenko participated in the main exhibition of the 49th Venice Biennale with his Chornobyl series. In 2004, he represented Ukraine at the 26th São Paulo Art Biennial with the project Dreamland Donbas about illegal coal miners in Eastern Ukraine, curated by Jerzy Onuch.
The same year, Marushchenko founded the Viktor Marushchenko School of Photography, which has trained numerous Ukrainian photographers and remains an influential institution to this day. He co-founded the photography magazine 5.6 in 2010, which also encompassed an online gallery and sales platform for Ukrainian photography. In 2019, Marushchenko was awarded the “For Contribution to Photography” prize by the Ukrainian cultural magazine Bird in Flight.
Viktor Marushchenko passed away in September 2020 after a long battle with cancer. Through this website, his sons and legal heirs, Yuriy Marushchenko and Thore V. Kohl, are making key works from his extensive archive accessible to a wider public.
