A blackthorn fall

This year, the exhibition will be held for the 16th time. As always, it will offer a kind of a chronicle, showing how Ukraine lived in this year. It will be another chapter of the visual history of Ukraine, recorded by participants of our photo contest. It would have never happened without the previous “pages,” that are stored in our photo albums and Den’s archives.

No. 25 of Route No. 1 is entitled Den’s Photos. This is a unique guide to our photo contest, covering everything from its beginning to this year’s exhibition. In fact, Den’s creative team has blazed the route by providing the crucial years, photos, and names for the issue. It will help our reader to understand why this year’s photos picture the events they do: our previous photo exhibitions saw works that were early harbingers of things to come as well. For example, Natalia Kravchuk’s photo report series has turned to be a correct political forecast...

“Our photo exhibitions make up an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon, because they show and explain everything. In fact, we have not had our recent history written yet, and    we must write it, create what I would call The Recent History for Dummies. I often recall certain fairy tale stories, like the one where the protagonist goes into a dark forest and leaves pebbles on the ground to know which way to return... A photo is such a ‘pebble’! By browsing the albums of our photo exhibitions, one can see how our country has wandered into a ‘dark forest’ and how it is now trying to find a way out of it…,” Den’s editor-in-chief Larysa Ivshyna wrote in her traditional column.

 Route No. 1 includes interesting infographics Den’s Photo Contest, which was prepared by Yaryna Mykhailyshyn. For example, it informs the reader that the exhibition has already traveled… 322,000 kilometers while visiting various cities of Ukraine. Still more travel is to come! Another interesting bit is that every fourth photo contestant got an award in 2013.

The glossy supplement comprises also interesting stories related to the photo contest, an interview with the author of Lionka the Politician photo Oleksandr Svystunov, interviews with the winners of the contest in the children’s category... Our readers will learn how Den’s own school of photography took shape and find quite a few other interesting and useful contributions on the pages of Route No. 1.

The glossy cover features blue-and-yellow birds sitting amid blackthorns. A prickly blackthorn branch with glaucous blue berries is a symbol of this year’s Den’s Photo Exhibition. It stands for the thorny path which we all now follow, breaking through obstacles with bloody sacrifice, and which the participating photographers were able to record in their works. It stands also for the ability to protect ourselves and ours. Any ornithologist will tell you that birds love to nest in the prickly blackthorn branches, because they are safe there, seeing as no predator can get through them... Is not it applicable to our situation, as we defend our ancestral land in the eastern regions? To some extent, our photo contest is a defense measure as well, trying to protect us from distorted pictures of the world.

“I am often asked what criteria I use in selecting photos, as chair of the jury. I respond: ‘It is simple – the photo must have something else shown, not just the picture itself,’” Ivshyna stressed.

Request No. 25 of Den’s glossy monthly supplement Route No. 1: Den’s Photos at newsstands as soon as October 17 or order it on Den’s website. It will be on offer at the Lavra Gallery as well, for the duration of the photo exhibition, that is, from October 18 through 26.