“Why is it blue?” is a meditation on family in post-Soviet Ukraine.

I started “Why is it blue?” as my response to the theme of parenthood as I am hoping to be a parent one day. I was also attempting to heal a somewhat strained relationship with my parents. Remembering personal stories between me and my parents brought me to the realisation that many events happening within my family were shaped by what was happening in Ukraine at the time.

The early 90s and the independence of Ukraine following the collapse of the Soviet Union was a time of change for all Ukrainian people. My father used to serve in the Soviet military and he resigned in one of the most challenging times for Ukraine. He remained unemployed for a long time, raising four children with my mom, became a priest, and later discovered beekeeping and started a honey business. I am sharing stories of life challenges, and happy and confusing family moments.

The Polaroids refer to events from the past. I think of them as small fragments that I managed to draw from my recollections and crystallise onto those surfaces. They are my memories. Some of them are also pictured in words, and I have written them down as small texts and dialogues. The digital photographs, on the other hand, refer to the present. The book contains some of the memories that are too heavy to keep and talk about. I have put them down on perforated pages. I wish I could erase them as easily as it is to tear a page from a book.

This work draws from ethnographic research methods. Sarah Pink highlights the importance of experience to obtain and represent knowledge (1). The importance of lived experience is the unifying idea that runs through this project.

The other influence comes from Rosy Martin’s and Jo Spence’s work on phototherapy. I wanted to see if photography could help me understand the relationship with my parents better. After reading Martin’s texts, I understood I could achieve it by remembering the past that I wanted to forget or deny. In other words, by giving those memories a shape and letting them resurface. This was the primary motivation to continue shaping my notes and pictures related to the strongest experiences I had with my parents. And to share them with others. Martin’s motivations resonate with my own. She talks about “becoming the subject rather than the object or our own histories” (2). Facing up to unresolved issues, and re-experiencing a range of frozen or repressed emotions (3), can eventually lead to a cathartic release.

Bibliography

Martin, R. (2001) “The Performative body: Phototherapy and Re-enactment” in Afterimage, November – December. Available at http://www.rosymartin.info/performative_body.html (Accessed: 22 May 2021).

Martin, R. and Spence, J. (2003) “Photo-Therapy: Psychic Realism as a Healing Art?” in The Photography Reader. Ed. Liz Wells. London: Routledge, pp.402-9.

Pink, S. (2015) Doing Sensory Ethnography, second edition. London: Sage.