The lonely bench and other stories...

I am awfully behind writing this blog and sorting my thoughts but somehow did not get around to this week. This bench has appeared over the last few days in the backyard I can see from my room and I am sure that it has some deeper meaning. It just sits there in the middle of the court, nobody ever sits on it or uses it otherwise, just a lonely bench in a sea of activity…

More importantly, this week was crucial in sorting out my major project, which I will shoot over the summer. I had a few very useful discussions with some of my tutors, which assisted tremendously to align my thoughts and crystallize the eventual shape of my project.

I have now decided to return to the Ukraine over the summer and attempt a portrait of daily life around the Independence Square (Maidan Nezalezhnosti). The square will serve as the geographic boundary for my project and as a metaphor for the different strata of the Ukrainian society, which all at the same time coalesce and clash in this square. Now that the parliamentary election date has been set for September 30th, I expect this portentous square, which saw the culmination of the political rallies during the Orange Revolution, feature prominently again and serve as a contested space for the pro-Russian and pro-Western parties.

The Financial Times ran an interesting article yesterday on the Ukraine and the current political situation there. It also included the graph below depicting the election results in March 2006 (blue = Yanukovych’s party, red = Tymoshenko bloc and beige = Yushchenko’s party). The graph is very telling and shows the pro-Russian/pro-Western dividing line running through the country geographically and the Ukrainian society as a whole. I will be fascinating for me to be there in September just before the next elections… I can’t wait to get my major project started…



Separately I have been continuing reading the biography on Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth (which I have started a few months ago but for some reasons put away for a few weeks and am only now returning to). In a nutshell, Diane Arbus was a seminal photographer in the sixties and seventies in the US who influenced a whole generation of future photographers. She originally came from a very well off family but was fascinated by and photographed around the fringes of society. In her final years she descended more and more into her own dark world and depression and ultimately committed suicide in 1971.

Walker Evans (who was close to her) said about her – and here you might see some relevance for me and my final project – that Arbus was attracted to the underworld and called her a ‘huntress’ for lowlife. Arbus had an obsession for strangeness as a way of escaping both boredom and depression. Echoing in a sense what Susan Sontag would say a few years later: ”[that for many photographers] … class is the deepest mystery – the exhaustible glamour of the rich and powerful, the opaque degradation of the poor and outcast – social misery has inspired the comfortably off with the urge to take pictures … in order to document a hidden reality that is a reality hidden from them.” (Susan Sontag, On Photography).