Eastern Partnership Photography
our money on, or orienting our life towards? Pictures and images often stand
for values and attitudes, and we have to
learn to identify them and to understand
whether we want to share them or not.
I believe that this type of education
on “reading” images is an important element of building civil society. A selfconscious and strong civil society will
more and more ask the questions I am
talking about here above and will be
able to read the real messages of photographed pictures and distinguish coherent and genuine attempts to be true
from falseness, and honest and transparent intentions from propaganda.
Last but not least, education on
reading images also includes education
on the esthetics and artistic assessment
of photographed images, and is thus per
se part of cultural education.
– Within the SAY CHEESE! project,
cross-country exchange activities,
such en plein air photo and training
sessions, master classes and exhibitions, proved to be particularly successful. Amateur and professional
photographers in Armenia, Belarus,
Moldova, Azerbaijan, Moldova and
Ukraine are eager to get to know
their colleagues from other countries, analyse their works, learn from
them and draw inspiration from their
culture, way of thinking, experience
and techniques. What would you say
is the best way to foster cooperation
between Eastern Partnership photographers and what needs to be done to
encourage such cooperation?
I believe this is up to the photographers themselves to identify what
helps them most. I am also glad to hear
that in your project the cross-border
cooperation has been a success. I very
much believe in this international approach. It has been an essential part of
my own learning curve: get out of your
“daily routine” have a chance to meet
new people and the more diverse the
places they come from are, the more
diverse their own cultural background
and experience are, the more enlightening these encounters are. You learn
much better and faster to distinguish
between very specific problems of a
specific place or sector and common
and joint problems that are shared by
everybody and to figure out which joint
solutions and approaches lead to better
and more sustainable results, compared
to believing that one is so special that
nobody else can help.
Meeting people is and has always
been the best way of exchanging experience. Unfortunately it is a pretty
expensive approach that not many and
not often can afford. Fortunately, with
the Internet we have gained a medium
that allows for long-distance communication and exchange of experience
that will never replace the one-to-one
communication, but that comes very
close to its efficiency. I am certain,
that exchanging collections of photos
and organising for instance thematic
international exhibitions in the various countries, not only in the capitals,
could have a double effect, both, by
contributing to education of large audiences a