A book dressed up as a paper or a paper dressed up as a book? Either way, in its form this publication maintains the desired documentary association with newspapers by being printed on newsprint, complete with rough fore-edges and gripper holes in the margin. Each right-hand page carries a portrait of a passer-by in Kiev’s Independence Square or Maidan in February 2014, during the brief period in which power was in the hands of the Ukrainian people after the bloody revolution of 2013 against the Russian bear hug. French photographer Émeric Lhuisset asked passers-by about their hopes for the future and what they thought would actually happen. Their handwritten answers, along with six typographed translations, are printed to the left of each respondent’s portrait.

The interior has been printed on a rotary press. The print quality on the newsprint is pretty good and solid except for some smudging of the photos on the left-hand page, but that in no way detracts from the documentary feel and the sense of urgency.

The strict regularity of the large portraits and the texts of very varied thoughts about the future create an expectant army of ‘ordinary’ people who through this medium make a strong fist of bringing their message to wider attention – a matter of even greater gravity given developments in Kiev since then.