Oleksandr Glyadyelov is a Ukrainian documentary photographer and photojournalist, born in 1956 in the Polish town of Legnica. In 1974 he moved with his family to Kyiv, where he studied optics and instrumentation at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. As a photographer, he has covered military conflicts in Moldova, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan, Somalia, South Sudan, and Ukraine. Since 1997, he has actively cooperated with the international humanitarian organisation Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) and other international organisations such as HRW, The Global Fund, UNAIDS, and UNICEF. His work addresses social issues: military conflicts, humanitarian crises, child homelessness, prisons, HIV / AIDS, tuberculosis and hepatitis C epidemics, and drug addiction.
He deliberately photographs with an analogue camera on black-and-white film and prints his photos at his home laboratory in Kyiv. Glyadelov is also a teacher at the Ukrainian Photo Schools, Victor Marushchenko School of Photography, and Bird in Flight. Among his numerous awards and honours are: Ukrpressphoto-97 Grand Prix for his series Abandoned Children; Hasselblad Prize at the European Photography Competition in Vevey, Switzerland, Images’98; Mother Jones 2001 Medal of Excellence of the International Documentary Photography Foundation in San Francisco, USA; Moving Walls 2002 of the Open Society Institute (OSI) in New York, USA. He was also the winner of the Shevchenko Prize 2020 for the photo project Carousel. Glyadelov lives and works in Kyiv.