An unexpected meeting in a Budapest apartment building became the beginning of this intimate photo series, captured by Alexander Tarazona and featuring Hanna Mykhailenko.
Alexander:
“Funny how fate works. How coincidences, when you look closely, stop feeling like coincidences. How something that starts as an accident ends up becoming a story.
It’s my first day in Budapest. The streets smell like history—like stones that have heard too much and still keep quiet. No one here bothers to hide the passing of time. They don’t cover it up. They don’t smooth it over. They let it be. Let it stay. Let it grow, like the mold on high ceilings or the cracks in old walls. And that’s beautiful. To see time as it is—imperfect, honest, inevitable. To see how time passes… and passes through us. It moves through us. It pulls us under. It leaves marks.
Walking out of my flat, with my camera still in my backpack and my head still halfway in Barcelona, I ran into Hanna—a Ukrainian student who’d arrived in the city just three days earlier. Coincidence? You decide. There was no need to plan anything—Budapest had already written the script.
I told her about the chances floating in the air here. The kind nobody sees, but that hover quietly, waiting for someone to catch them. I suggested we create something together, though neither of us knew what that would be yet.
Hanna has that rare gift of making you feel at home. Not because of the place—because of her. She’s versatile, radiant, with a mix of shyness and sensuality that disarms you without trying. A sweetness that never apologizes, and a strength that doesn’t need to prove itself. Now we’re just neighbors. The kind who bump into each other in bathrobes. The kind who share books… and wine. In the end, it’s good to have someone next door to ask for sugar—or coffee. The girl next door.”
Photographer: Alexander Tarazona
Model: Hanna Mykhailenko
