Special Issue
Maryna Batsiukova:
Photography is not just an
object but also a viewpoint
Maryna Batsiukova is a photographer and curator,
as well as the Vice Chairperson of the Belarusian Nonprofit Association Photoiskusstvo (PhotoArt), which is
an association of Belarusian photographers. Born in
Minsk, Belarus, she has always worked there.
The key subjects of her photographic research are
the individual’s inner state, people’s relationship with
the environment and human behavior in society.
“Before we go travelling, we often
imagine what is awaiting us, what we
are going to do and shoot. Yet, when
we actually feel the road under our
feet, we say good-bye to these flights
of imagination. We have to be quick
off the mark and open to all new experiences we go through, so that they
leave their imprint on us instead of
vanishing without a trace. Trips give
lavish gifts, including visual ones, so
we learn to pick them out. However,
things that hook us and catch our eye
always tend to be fragments of ourselves that reflect our inner world –
this is what makes them so close and
dear to us. We may look for new images and forms, but we invariably
fill them with what we have, in other
words, with ourselves. Even though
our flights of imagination stay behind, we interpret the reality in terms
of what we are open and inclined to
and what we can see, grasp and imagine.” (For an exhibition of Belarusian
photographers Andrej Dubinin and Andrej Karachun A Man on the Road).
In April 2014 Minsk hosted a workshop on Technologies, trends and methods in modern photography. It was held
within the framework of the EU-funded
SAY CHEESE! Eastern Partnership Family Album: Capacity Building, Networking and Promotion of Thematic Eastern
Partnership Photography project and
the Second Minsk Photography Festival.
Its program had lectures and master classes by Belarusian, Ukrainian and
Moldovan photographers and media artists, as well as exhibitions of works by
young Moldovan, Ukrainian, Armenian
and Belarusian photographers. Oleksandr Lyapin, the photographer, curator
and teacher from Ukraine, shared his
experience and methods of producing
creative photo projects with the trainees, focusing on breaking away from
pigeonholing in expressing your ideas
both visually and verbally. Ihor Belskyi,
the professional photographer from
Ukraine, held a master class in pinhole
photography, where the learners had
an opportunity to make a camera, take
pictures with it and see the end product after they developed the photos
right during the master class. Tatyana
Fedorova from Moldova spoke about
the ways of presenting photo projects.
Workshops on cyanotype method by
Viktar Žuraŭkoŭ and using light pen by
Viktor Suglob attracted a lot of attention. (Both of them come from Belarus.)
The exhibitions of emerging photographers from four Eastern Partnership countries made an unforgettable
impression owing to their unique vision
of the world around us and their photographic means of expression.
The Ukrainian Photo Art Studio L∞K
(Valeria Barvinskaya, Dmitro Bariv, Ihor
Belskyi, Lana Yankovskaya, Liya Dostleva, Mykola Kozhemyako, Olha Kasyanyuk,
Olha Tkachenko, Svetlana Morozova,
Yury Lisovskyi, Yuliya Polunina-But led
by the well-known art figure Oleksandr
Lyapin, who inspires and encourages
them) defined the theme of the exhibition called Our Common Individual Features as the relationship between the
individual and collective elements both
in the mind of each individual and society’s collective unconscious in general.
“There is no such thing as anything
individual and there can never be,” said
the L∞K photographers. “Individual
traits are always dissolved in what is
common so that they lose their own
individuality. It is separate body parts
that gain their individuality in a sculp-
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