Isa Leshko: Elderly Animals
anita līcis-ribak's blog |
architecture art photography music culture travel |
6pm. at the University of Massachusetts chancellor Robert C. Holub and Sabine Holub's house.
I'd never asked myself this question before. But the theme and the title of an upcoming photography show - What Matters About Photography? - at the Vermont Center for Photography made me ponder. Where do I even begin? There are innumerable ways in which photography matters - to me. This is what I wrote in a short essay that accompanied my submission for this annual juried exhibition, and that only begins the conversation for me:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious, Albert Einstein once said.
Photography allows me to dwell on, to capture, and to share with others what I see as the immeasurable and the mysterious in our lives - be that a child’s face as she relishes the feel of her fingers sinking in the warm fur of the cat’s belly; or the stillness of time, void of space and sound, as I watch my husband quietly fight for his life; or the pattern of light, flowing outward through a tobacco barn’s open slats, like outstretched wings of a gigantic bird about to take off into the dark winter night; or the way the world suddenly arranges itself, just this one time, just right here, in front of me... I am reminded, time and again, in these plentiful moments of witnessing life’s mysteries, to remember life. Memento Vita - paraphrasing the ageless wisdom of the Ancient Romans.
I am very excited to announce that three of my photographs - Raiija and Runka, Accordionists, and an Untitled from 30 Days in Spring Series were accepted for the show. You may already be familiar with the faces of Railija and Runka, and of the Accordionists, both of which were on display in Amherst in Northampton this past winter. I haven't yet however shown any photographs from the 30 Days in Spring series. These document Agus's quiet and willful fight with cancer last April, 2010. I am both nervous and thrilled to have one of them on display in this upcoming show.
Please come to the opening reception this Friday, April 1 in Brattleboro, VT. See more information below. And no, it is not an April fool's joke! :-)
Accordionists. Rīga, Latvia. 2009
|
|
This afternoon, I will be giving a presentation on my personal design and photography work at Smith College as part of the spring lecture series, Daughters of Invention. I am thrilled to be in such an inspiring company! Last hours of preparation...
I have unearthed, after 13 years of it laying dormant, my Masters of Science thesis project on Architecture+Music. Still today, the subject is so relevant to me, and fresh!
Morton Feldman once said: I paint the canvas of time with colors of sound. John Cage may have added: ...and silence....
It will be 25 years this June since I left пос.Черский/the town of Cherskiy in northeast Russia where I lived through my adolescence, my first kiss, my first (and only) 'deadly' confrontation with my father, and many a dream, including a non-realisable dream of escape from home - not very original, being a product of teenage brain.
I am feeling a strong pull to go back and revisit (not so much the trials of adolescence!). The 25 years have added new lines to my face, and presumably to my brain. Some of the topographic expressions of both may be attributed to the string of information I have been digesting, arriving in a continuous telegraph that started 25 years ago, after I left Cherskiy. The year was 1986, and the geyser of Glasnost had opened up the floodgates of information available to the wary but truth-hungry consumers. It's about the history of the place. In fact, it's about the history of the whole country, USSR then, and how its jagged edges cut up the life of my family, and all other nucleuses of that society (The USSR always proudly maintained that each family is a nucleus of society. And then, it would go on to explode this 'nucleus' from within).
I was telling about my new travel plans to a close friend recently, and she told me, oh it is going to be wonderful, have fun! I thought for a second, and said, uhm, well, I don't think so, and went to the book shelf to take down a behemoth of a tome, called GULAG. This is my very handy travel guide to the place I once called home.
I don't even know how does one get there these days. The transportation system in Russia today is as perplexing as it was during Soviet times. I did some research on the web, and found out that a company called Polar Airlines does fly small planes to Cherskiy. Their website has a map of all their travel routes, all originating in Yakutsk, the capital of Saha republic, and does include Cherskiy. I followed their link to the flight schedules and rates, and found no mention of Cherskiy there. This puzzling discrepancy may as well be a harbinger of things to come, shall I embark on this journey. I've got the bug now, and the only way of ridding myself of it is by obliging....
I will take liberty of blaming my new affliction on Ian Frazier, with his Travels in Siberia, a wonderfully engaging book, alive with characters, history, and humor, which I just finished reading. He took me back home, to Siberia, the easy way: a mere $20-or-so for my hard cover copy, on a warm living room sofa.The 'hard way' would entail 24 hours of flying on at least 3 different planes, through 16 time zones, and eating dry kielbasa for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a duration of the trip. Did I mention the $2,500 I would be required to furbish to pay for the treatment of this delirium of mine?.... (I welcome suggestions on what health insurance might cover such a 'treatment'!) $2,500 is what it would take to come by the half-dosen airplane tickets I would need to procure, to get me to Cherskiy. Trust me, I would walk, except there are no roads that lead there. Not in a reasonable season, anyway. (You can walk on the river ice roads, in winter. But then, would you?...) I would take a train. But thankfully, there were limits to just how far the great Soviet railway system, with its millions of free slave laborers, would reach. No railways anywhere near Chersky, aslo known as Nizhnie Kresty, one of Gulag's northernmost labor concentration camps, listed as Nr. 27 on some lists, absent altogether from most of Gulag camp maps.
This photograph from the archives of the Museum of Exile and Resistance in Kaunas, Lithuania, was taken in the early 1950s. It shows one of Gulag's gold-mining concentration camps on the Kolyma river in northeast Russia.
Google Maps tells me they could not calculate directions, nor the travel distance between Anchorage, Alaska, and the town of Cherskiy, Russia...