Andres Gonzalez lives in L.A. but spends a lot of time traveling to places way shittier to take pictures of such pristine composition you’d swear they were set pieces. He recently did a spell in the Ukrainian resort town of Truskavets putting together a series called Sanatorium about the local spas and all the folk who go there. We talked to him about what that was all about.
Vice: How’d you end up in Truskavets?
Andres: My girlfriend is out there right now. She got a Fulbright to go out there for a year, so I went to help her settle in and get her feet wet. We were out on the western side of the country. I had a little money saved up and was looking for a project, and I found this pretty cool place out in the mountains. It had these sanatoriums that were really bizarre and kind of touristy, but all centered around health and healing and magical healing water that tasted like gasoline.
That’s the nuftusya, right? What was in it that made it taste so bad?
Part of it was a mineral called ozocerite. It’s almost like a coal, petroleum-type mineral that they find around the town, and that mineral kind of gets in the water. It’s supposed to be really good for you. There are a lot of other minerals in the water too, but for all that I talked to people about it nobody could really give me a straight answer on why it worked. It was just they’ve been drinking it for so long that it’s almost fanatical.
More shots from Sanatorium.
Do you think there’s something behind it, or is it all just to keep tourists coming in?
I don’t know. I met a tour guide that was taking me around. She’d only been there for like a month and didn’t know why it worked but she felt like all her acne was clearing up. It’s seems like more of a faith-based thing than having actual hard evidence backing it up. Really bizarre.
Did you try any of the treatments?
I really just drank the water. I didn’t actually take a bath or anything but I did wash my face with it—it had kind of a slimy texture.
Are there a lot of really sick people there hoping this will be like a miracle cure?
Some people are sick. I met one guy who had tuberculosis and he’d been there for like three months and was planning on staying for the rest of the year. A lot of people who are sick go there because it’s really cheap—the government pays for it with some kind of tax break, but basically you can get 12 days at the sanatorium for free. So a lot of people go because they can spend those 12 days meeting one-on-one with doctors. The doctors will prescribe a diet that these people should go on, and how many doses of this water they should take.
Do the sickies make up the majority of people there, or is it more of a health-nut kind of thing?
Most of the people that I met were just tourists that use it as a health resort or spa. They go there and commune with other people who want to be healthy for a week. Ukrainians are not the healthiest people in the world, so they go to this resort and are kind of on this regiment of eating really healthily, and exercising, going on like group hikes in the mountains.
What’s so unhealthy about their usual routines?
They still don’t import a lot of vegetables so their diet is really bad, and the idea of daily exercise isn’t really popular. They prefer to eat salami and heavy bread and starch and different roots, so a typical meal would be like potato soup and different heavy pastries or cakes, or beet soup. I was at this huge festival where people just eat all these different kinds of pig fat, and they eat it like you’d eat cheese. Lots of fatty high-starch diets. So, they’d go to this place for 12 days and eat oranges and lots of vegetables. It’s a different thing for them, the whole thing of exercising daily—there’s nothing like that in their normal lifestyles.
Go to andresgonzalezphoto.com to see more of his stuff.
Good Living
