issue 3 | autumn 201 4
IMBALANCE issue 3 | autumn 2014
PROVINCE Cover: Masha Svyatogor Editor's note 4 Interview: Arnis Balcus 6 "Victory Park": Arnis Balcus 9 Comments to the topic "Province": Vladimir Parfenok 19 "Photography from the Trash Bin": Vladimir Parfenok 20 "Once Upon a Time in the Kingdom of far far Away": Masha Svyatogor 37 "Desire to Transform Marshland into Wine": Valeriya Korzhueva 54 "Sula. The Unbroken": Marina Batjukova 66 "Young Provincial Girl’s Notes": Tanja Lisovskaya 84 "Put in a Good Word for the Province": Olga Bubich 96
Editor: Alexandra Soldatova English version: Olga Bubich Web page: Maxim Dosko Informational support: Znyata.com
Editor’s note Choosing the theme of “province” was not accidental for me. Province, or a village – in the narrower sense – has always been a sort of hallmark for large Belarusian photo clubs, as well as for press photography. I was wondering about the contemporary reflecting author’s attitude to... but to what? to his/her own country? to the ancestors? to the present? The answer to this question in terms of “to what” or “to whom” despite of being rather obvious, has always left me wondering, it was hiding behind the elderly village ladies’ colorful scarves or, vice versa, behind the black and white poverty. Almost complete lack of interpretation given by the authors, their inability to let the issue “pass through themselves”, unwillingness to try and accept everything that exists beyond the ring road, became a stimulus for long debates and talks about seemingly "boring" photography. And partly these conversations, as well as photographs that are able to describe this fragment of reality, ordinary, everyday, routine, but at the same time really immense are simple enough. I received the shortest and the most obvious, but no less important for the Belarusian photographer, comment from Martin Parr who said that "boring" pictures were important because they were actually our today's life, the reality itself. What is boring today will be interesting when years pass and we will forget about it. You can learn about our talks and opinions in the interviews with Arnis Balcus and Vladimir Parfenok and in the essay written by Olga Bubich. As for me, not only as an editor, but as a photographer, too, I only would like to add that we seem not to have enough courage. The village, almost completely transformed into a small “agrotown” is separated from the highway which we use to get into the countryside when travelling to reach it by a sort of an invisible wall. It is much higher than pink and green concrete fences and to pass it over to see that life exists behind it as well, to understand one’s attitude to it, to make it part of one’s reality is not easy. I would like to wish to all my fellow photographers, to have more courage. Text and photo: Alexandra Soldatova
ARNIS BALCUS www. www. balcus. lv
- What do you shoot about?
visit all the cities and towns.
For eight 8 years all my projects have been more or less about Latvia, the place where I come from. They dealt with the issues that I found interesting and unusual, they were about the way we differ from others or, on the contrary, are similar to them. 2 years ago there was a period when I travelled all through the country. Looking at the map I realized that I had visited almost all the places, well, not really all of them, it could be just impossible, but I did
- Why do you show to the viewers something that they already know about Latvia? project started because I really liked looking at photos dating back to the Soviet times, they have a sort of minimalism. The photos from the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1950s, I mean ordinary, not artistic ones, those which were once made for postcards and official albums. I also wanted to grasp and freeze a certain Latvian Notes
moment‌ One the one hand, my photos, to some extent, remind those times. In most cases they also seem to have been made in the 1970s-1980s. I enjoy looking for places and moments which are characteristic of such an atmosphere, where the time has stopped, nothing is changed and, probably, nothing will change in the next 10 years. But the question was different! I do not know what the viewers like. First you certainly think about what interests you personally. The reason why I mentioned historical photos is that my works are also photos as witnesses of time. They will certainly become more interesting in future, but it does not mean that I do not make them for today. I see it, and this is an interesting point, that we underestimate the things in front of us, right before our
eyes. It concerns all sorts of things, including the environment to which we are accustomed and in which we live every day when going home from work. We do not notice anything, we are immune to what is going on there. I think that an eye-opener to me was the fact that for a while I had lived abroad. I studied and lived in London at the moment when I actually started making a project about Latvia. I had a project named "Amnesia", which was a sort of a starting point for all, I mean the interest in my own country as an event in photography. - Is Latvian Notes more a true project or memories of yours? No, it is not a true project. Amnesia was a memory, I was taking pictures of the
Soviet time rituals. And now I have a sort of an image, which I see in my head, the way I perceive Latvia and the environment. And probably I simply find some things which confirm my viewpoint, my own thinking. I look with quite a distant gaze, searching, for example, for a square where people gather together or bus stations, shops. I am interested in the places where usually some kind of social life evolves. - And what is more important in this project – social life or a place where it evolves? Place, of course! After all, social life does NOT evolve, all is empty there. - Why do you choose quite a simple visual language for your stories? Do you mean that a project is shot in a simple way? There is an old school of photography here in Latvia, and in Belarus I assume it also exists, it was built on the traditions of pictorialism when photography was imitating painting. These people make aesthetically very good portraits, landscapes ... they do something in labs. It reminded art, and shooting which happens out and inside, at homes, was not just easy, but vulgar. But what should art and photography tell us about if not about themselves and about how you see the world? Maybe there is someone else who sees it in the same way, or maybe someone is just interested in your story. However, literature also deals with not only the lives of politicians, kings or fairy tales, there are also stories about ordinary people, and they are also interesting. Photography shares this function.
Victory Park
VLADIMIR PARFENOK www. parfianok. iatp. by
-Why is there so little province as a topic in belarussian photography? Because other topics are not present in photography either. What do we have? People photograph mostly what can bring them money: weddings, fashion, reportage… To shoot province, one must either live there and be aware of his/her place (and to do this one must be a very mature author) or have much money at one’s disposal. -Is there a feeling that not extreme things are shot by no one, neither bad nor good ones? It happens probably because there are almost no thinking photographers, maybe also to a certain extent well-off in order to be able to create works without keeping in mind that they expect to get a financial reward for them in the future. To do art is still a rather costly activity. -But do we actually «uninteresting» photos?
need
these
Certainly, we do. But probably we have not yet had enough of this excess of positive good photography. For instance, Parr had an idea to shoot «uninteresting» pictures because everything had already been photographed, everything had already been done well. He started looking for anti heroic topics, banality, and he was not the only one, he simply managed to form a brand out of it.
VLADIMIR PARFENOK www. parfianok. iatp. by
Photography from the Trash Bin This is just a theme extract, a selection of photos from my extensive project "Photography from the Trash Bin. 20032009," prepared for a show within the project "Belarusian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale" (Minsk, June 2009). My idea was to look into my computer "trash bin", extracting and restoring the pictures that had previously been rejected by me due to various reasons and more often - because of stylistic or thematic incompatibility with my earlier work. Thus, this kind of archeology, reevaluation and re-use of one’s one creativity which due to the subjective selfperception filters actualized by the product of one’s work did not become such, being immediately rejected as "inappropriate", "incompatible", "banal", "looking like someone else's," or as being "just unclear " and thus sent into the virtual "trash bin" – a place for aging of "the missed masterpiece" of the photographer of the digital age...
MASHA SVYATOGOR www. flickr. com/photos/masha_svyatogor/
Once Upon a Time in the Kingdom of Far Away I referred to the places where I had spent my childhood, where my house used to be, seeming so strong and eternal, invulnerable and windproof, but where now "only a feeling is left."
There was no snow yet, the frosted grass mixed trash was glistening in the sun. It was windy and warm. I was completely alone on that island. I was standing on a bench at the beach and looking at the frozen blue water and the earth’s wool. I This series is a return, a memory of what could go either way. I seemed to be is close and important to me. Childhood, happily greeted and welcomed by anyone. earth, roots, a man missing in these photos, who used to live in this small I was following the route, which was town and died long ago, whose presence running into my past. At first, I could you strongly feel, even though you saw recognize very little, I was walking with him only once - briefly, with the corner of my eyes closed, rediscovering this earth, your eye, with only one half. and then I began to recall it gradually and slowly, I felt and experienced everything This is the story of my kingdom, about the as if for the first time. I seemed to come time I used to have, about my little and back home after a long absence from my only homeland, about my joy, about some imprisonment or pilgrimage that the place, which grew together with me took me half of my life, from oblivion I and where in the material world only returned to the house of the soul, with horns and legs were left. which I had been divided by circumstances, time and so on. We got used to having our "nest" ruined, we mastered a new space, changed our Those things which I managed to household, adapted to a new life and reconstruct in my memory looked like an forgot about heaven. People who shared infinitely long film footage without any our life styles are gone, homes were sold, plot or ending – about a dream of a fragile and those who survived were overgrown and transparent world. with grass. A garden once flourishing got populated with frogs and reptiles. The What I managed to shoot was gradually rooms are littered with smoldering debris, overgrown by elusive traces of human but still sometimes let the dusty light in. presence, the remains of the things, an abandoned habitat, a place on earth where So, on Christmas Day I got on a bus and I felt well and where I come back from went to the place where my great- time to time. grandfather had been living for long.
VALERIYA KORZHUEVA Desire to Transform Marshland into Wine There is a bit of acid here, you get burned with it and return into consciousness, feeling the water in your body. And don’t you fear to feel it again? It will be intriguing, because God is biased when dealing with kids, still He gives them a vanilla forest warmed by the sun and filled up with marshland. He gives them fogs, cutting a wide swath, and rosecolored glasses. And now, the forest puts the glasses on and says, "Let me be a clown!" He makes fun at all their problems, and only weakness has put down her down in front of the flowers which are blocking the light that threaten her now. And who is she? She is a victim of the heat, she is a hostage, she is a white canvas. All the light that reaches her is worthy of being as much clear as she allows it to approach her. This time flowers do not let the light pass. Now FLOWERS have the harmony. They are blossoming. And this chapter is a New Testament post. Those victims would be alive who washed themselves with marshland water‌
MARINA BATJUKOVA www. marynabatsiukova. com
Sula. The Unbroken The camera helps me capture the original world of traditions mixed with lurid daily routine of village life. Once pagan, later transforming into Christians, yesterday’s communists and today’s Orthodox believers still spit three times over their left shoulder to keep luck. This is how one can define a cultural fusion shown in this series. Ceremonial costumes are reminiscent of the ethnographic photos made by Mikhas Romaniuk. Only this time we face a strange situation of the gap between the tradition and modernity. In the pictures we simultaneously observe century-old ceremonial dresses and shabby Chinese plastic sandals. Globalization comes into these villages, but passing through the filter of local life it becomes very special, authentic. You can see the photos from a new project «Sula. The Unbroken». In my new work I research the life of a village in Gomel region that evolves in the course of a spring holiday – the rite of «The Arrow’s Burial». The holiday’s tradition stays unchanged for many generations: the village female dwellers put on their national costumes. They sing and approach each other from different parts of the village until they meet in one single round-dance, keeping on signing and moving towards the corn. They seem to be weaving a towel – a joyful road to happiness and prosperity. They dance and sing, and then bury “a sula” into the
ground, thus symbolically hiding the dark force of destruction, transforming it into good, wealth and success. They also collect spikes which they consider as charms, then they fall down and roll in the corn, thus accumulating power and health. I tried to put into my pictures the condition of synesthesia. Our eyes feel the smell of corn, we hear ceremonial songs and grasp the smell of garlic and bacon. We see the combination of the dense ancient times, home life and humor. «The Arrow’s Burial» holiday is a rite designed to experience the irresistible movement of vitality in everything that is destined to rise, grow, bloom and mature. Now local people do not remember when and where it all started. But the laws of their archaic rituals, directly coming from weaving and embroidery developed here, are strictly followed by local folk singers. Thousands of generations changed, but that foundation which was once weaved by our great-grandmothers, again shoots up into the sky with its fiber-threads and the shuttle of memory quickly creates an ancient pattern of worshipping the earth and the sky, herbs and bread, the initiation and completion. Continuity in its ability to transform, to absorb the new, at the same time retaining the spirit of the old days, has been captured in rich colors of this photographic series.
TANJA LISOVSKAYA www. tanya. by
A Young Provincial Girl’s Notes “Fashionish” Colour, texture and material are live characters. (any similarity with reality is actually reality) I love it so much
OLGA BUBICH Essay. In conclusion.
Put in a Good Word for the Province It was during my University studies when I first faced the issue of “circles” and people who could belong or be excluded from them. Actually, like in any other higher educational institution in Minsk, we studied both with the capital dwellers and “the others” or “kolkhozniks”, as many called them behind their back, without really implying any negative meaning. It was clear to everyone that our modest “blue-eyed country” was unconventionally divided into these two categories of people, based on geographical and cultural aspects, with one of the layers logically aspiring by all means to join the other one. They differed in clothes, speech and habits, seeming almost alien to us, who raised in the city and thus we preferred to observe them at distance, leaving the right to spend our out-of-University pastime in the company of guys whose birthplace had more in common with ours. Provincial environment, or in other, simplier words – "the village" – visually evokes in most of us the memories closely connected with childhood. The village is a lazy summer routine with Granny’s furnace, accompanied with dramas of feathery chickens’ birth, collecting cherries in the garden and making trips to a village sauna, hostile with unfamiliar textures and colours of naked human bodies.
However, the indisputable optimism and magic of the childhood in the photographic sense remains solely the heritage of family archives, introducing into the public field the village of a completely different type. In this country it is almost traditionally used as a fruitful field by young photojournalists, who often set off to the countryside searching for speaking social themes that in practice turn out to be rather trivial. "Belarus has
been one of the most unphotographed countries in the world", - Siarhei Hudzilin
from "Nasha Niva" claims in one of his interviews. And we can do nothing but agree with him.
But, whatever sadness we might feel when stating this, in recent decades the subject of interest of the Belarussian photographers really does not vary a lot in the semantic field of the village, where focus is mostly made on the shades of sympathetic narration of the countryside retirees’ lives or on the depiction of pagan holidays at a cheap popular, almost carnival reality level. And therefore, the village, despite its social and cultural domination on the country’s scale, still remains for the Belarusian viewer a genuine disappearing “terra incognita”. It founds place neither on the pages of special editions nor in gallery halls which are occupied with the outcomes of the study made on “safer” topics.
And while the city-dwellers are busy discussing art-house films and consuming cocktails in fashionable lofts, "those not belonging to our circle" keep on not only dreaming of the capital, but also actively mastering the urban environment. With every new academic year curious and ambitious "kolkhozniks" fill in more and more places at Universities, gnawing not only a granite of science, but also that of practice, finding a job in the city and consequently taking their roots in the capital. Nowadays the province is bold in initiating an informal conversation with Minsk, but the question is which of those who aim at capturing and conserving the Belarusian reality will finally take up the responsibility to get down from the capital’s pedestal of the representatives of "their own circle" and tell everyone the success story of quite provincial guys? The society remains clearly segmented just like the field of photography itself where in the epicenter of events we can more often encounter an inarticulate metropolitan snob whose world appears to be more concerned with conducting Facebook battles.
In case of any questions or comments please contact us: imbalancemagazine@gmail.com.
www.imbalancemagazine.com