Mountains, people, photos
Any exhibit of works by Oleksandr Hliadielov, one of Ukraine’s leading photographers, is an event. His new show “Lopukhove-Brustury” (fragment) on display at Kyiv’s Kamera Gallery is unexpected in a certain sense.
Hliadielov is mostly known as an art photographer, who focuses on social themes. His works dedicated to AIDS- afflicted individuals, homeless children, and refugees have moved many people far beyond the confines of the artistic community. All of a sudden there is a change of theme-no problem, no tensions that usually stem from such a change, just a simple photographic story about Lopukhove, a remote Transcarpathian village.
People are chopping down trees, celebrating festive occasions, gathering mown hay, selling produce at a market, going to school, getting married, herding cattle, and riding motorcycles and bicycles. “The residents of Lopukhove, like all highlanders, are hard-working people. They rely only on their own resources and trust few people; they long ago stopped expecting help from anyone. All they want is to be left alone, so that they can live and work the way they want to.” This statement belongs to Hliadielov, who portrays the life of Lopukhove’s inhabitants the way he is accustomed: with a slow but keen eye.
This village has a rich history. It is located in a narrow, steep valley at the foot of Svydovetsky Ridge, on the shores of the Brusturianka River. It was founded by Ukrainian brigands, known as opryshky, as a mountain hideout, which they called Brustury. Toward the end of the 18th century Maria Theresa of Austria started a German settlement lower down in the valley. The Germans launched the forestry industry in this area. The village was renamed Lopukhove in 1947. In the 1990s, the Brusturianka overflowed its banks and caused considerable damage, killing people and destroying homes, roads, and the local narrow-gauge railway. (The roads and the railway are still not rebuilt.)
But Hliadielov does not focus his camera just on those painful hardships. The author of these works has enough daily life to reproduce Lopukhove’s history — or rather its many histories: the solitary cross on a hill, young schoolchildren with their flowers, who are hiding behind a pile of firewood, a young fellow wearing a T shirt saying “Zidane,” or the self-confident old guy riding his motorcycle (which somehow resembles the rider). This is Lopukhove, grand and funny at the same time.
Of course, there are photos-sophisticated black and white graphics, portraying steep forested mountain slopes with lumberjacks. In my opinion, however, his perception of the mountains is fantastically conveyed in the photo of the marketplace, with its well-built wooden rows, warmly dressed people, mountain peaks in the background, and suddenly in the foreground-a stand selling video cassettes and disks.
The photographer is keenly aware of chiaroscuro and his somewhat gloomy visual approach does not lead to emotional gloominess. Rather, it creates a feeling of a cool, humid atmosphere, the rhythm of hard days, the way people coexist with the forest in which each has to fight to survive.
This is the real work of a photographer: to find an ordinary spot on a map of a country and turn a tiny grain into a whole universe.
