Photographing a changing Ukraine in the 90s and 00s
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Loading... - Margarita Zavala
- 11 Apr 2023
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Ukrainian American photographer Katherine Turczan travelled to and from her homeland over 20 years.
Ukrainian American photographer Katherine Turczan travelled to and from her homeland over 20 years.
On 19th August 1991, hardline members of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party attempted to overthrow then-leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Resistant to his reforms program and opposed to the imminent signing of the New Union Treaty, the group sent KGB agents to hold him at his second home in Crimea while they returned to Moscow and prepared to mobilise. The situation led to a semi-media blackout across many parts of the Soviet Union, as TV and radio stations swapped out normal programming for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, which played on a loop. The ballet had previously been employed by stations following the deaths of several Communist party officials in the 80s. Now, more changes were afoot.
“Imagine your country is going through upheaval, and then suddenly, the government cut off all news and communication," Katherine Turczan says. "All of your news channels are emitting one ballet. It's very, very weird." Katherine is a Ukrainian American photographer who arrived in Kyiv three months earlier and was staying with her cousin. “The only news you could get was on the street, and that was sort of rumours. I was very frightened.” The attempted uprising, which lasted just a couple of days and was subsequently referred to as the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt or the August Coup, ultimately failed. Still, it would instigate the undoing of the USSR and the subsequent dissolution in December 1991 (the Act of Independence of Ukraine was adopted three months earlier).
Prior to arriving in the country, Katherine had completed an MFA at Yale School of Art and received a small grant to make photographs in Ukraine. “An uncle in New York got me a visa as a dancer because you didn't necessarily go and visit family then," she says. "It was loosening up, but you didn't visit your family; you went on cultural exchanges." Born in the States, she grew up in New Jersey in a Ukrainian Nationalist family. As a child, she attended Ukrainian school and Plast (Ukrainian Girl Scouts Camp), where she learned Morse code in the Cyrillic language. “My family was adamant in keeping their Ukrainian culture and not letting us acclimatise into the American system. They knew, like most people that have to escape from their primary culture into another place to survive, that assimilation happens quickly, so the culture was deeply ingrained.” Read More…
