In Moscow, these processes were felt more quickly: the capital of the empire always reacted first to shifting winds. But in Ukraine, reforms moved slowly, as though through thick molasses made of fear, inertia, and old rules. This was especially true of journalism. As for photography in the press, there was hardly anything to discuss at all. The old school of the Party newspaper still reigned there – severe and frozen, like a plaster mask. Staged shots, poster-like aesthetics, obligatory heroes on the front page gazing toward the radiant future. Editorial control was not simply strict – it was almost physical, like a hand resting on your shoulder. Subject matter remained narrow, and above everything hung the cold shadow of the KGB.
And yet, within this half-darkness, another fire was already smouldering. Ukrainian photojournalists were gradually gaining access to Western documentary photography. Journalists from the West arrived in Kyiv and other cities, and with them came different perspectives, different optics of reality. Albums by the legendary agency Magnum Photos and materials from the Black Star agency circulated hand to hand. It was like secretly reading forbidden books: pages were turned quietly, but entirely new worlds opened in people’s minds.
Yet for the real development of photojournalism, the essential thing was missing – a free and financially viable press that actually needed living photography. Newspapers that had begun restructuring still placed their faith in text. Photography remained merely illustrative – like a note scribbled in the margin of a long article.
In 1986, a tragedy exploded that tore apart the fabric of Soviet reality – the Chornobyl disaster. Photo reporters were allowed there only in limited, almost symbolic numbers – mostly from central Party publications and official agencies. Newspapers once again filled with familiar images: heroic liquidators, solemn demonstrations, convincing smiles. Powerful photographs from the power station’s roof were taken by photographer Igor Kostin, and they, too, spoke of heroism. But the press almost never asked: what happened to these heroes afterwards? What became of the people in the villages and towns surrounding the station? The silence was dense, like radioactive dust. And for many journalists and photographers, that silence had become intolerable.
In the winter of 1986, four photographers met at Khreshchatyk metro station in Kyiv: Oleksandr Ranchukov, Valerii Reshetniak, Oleksandr Kozulko, and myself – Oleksandr Liapin. We spoke about something almost impossible: creating a photographic collective modelled on Magnum Photos – independent, author-driven, founded on creative and economic freedom. We were already shooting social reportage, already feeling the gaze of the “organs” (ed. – meaning the KGB) upon us, though, for the time being, they were merely observing without dangerous attention.
We had not yet created anything. We were only dreaming. And then history, as it often does, opened a small crack. Under the Central Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League of Ukraine, a Committee of Youth Organisations (KMO TsK LKSMU) was established to support youth business initiatives. We used this fissure in the system’s concrete. That is how Pohliad was born.
We opened a bank account – an almost fantastical fact for a Soviet creative collective, and began working. Oleksii Levytskyi and I attempted to make agreements with several Kyiv newspapers and magazines: Komsomolskoye znamya, Ukraina, and Silski visti. But we were refused: our subject matter was deemed unsuitable and too expensive. The new democratic press was generally weak, and editors had little interest in photography. We had no right to conduct official economic activity with the foreign press. So we decided to concentrate on exhibitions instead. We sold tickets for one and a half karbovantsi (the predecessor currency to the Ukrainian hryvnia) and, in this way, built a budget to cover the costs of organising exhibitions and paying fees.
Exhibitions took place in Kyiv, Melitopol, Zhdanov (now Mariupol), Minsk, Slavutych, and elsewhere. For example, 9,170 tickets were sold for an exhibition at the Kyiv Planetarium. Photographers received small fees, distributed equally among all participants in the exhibition. Some refused the money, believing the sum too insignificant and insisting it should instead be spent on development.
Gradually, photographers joined us who would later come to define the face of Ukrainian documentary photography: Oleksii Levytskyi, Rita Ostrovska, Efrem Lukatsky, Serhii Supynskyi, Pavlo Pashchenko, Oleksandr Glyadyelov, Yurii Tugushev, and Vitalii Zaporozhchenko. Valerii Reshetniak headed the collective, while bookkeeping was handled by the staff accountant Ihor Lytvyn.
Reshetniak was our ideologue of the new, free documentary photography. Behind him already lay a long journey in this field. He had participated in numerous exhibitions, though not in Ukraine, but in Germany and Lithuania, and it was with “anti-Soviet” social photography. Valerii also had experience with dissident activity. His influence on the collective’s photographers was enormous.
Thanks to the support of Volodymyr Romanchuk, head of the department for film and photography amateur arts at the Centre for Folk Art, we were given premises in central Kyiv as a creative photographic collective under the KMO TsK LKSMU – a separate ground-floor apartment in an old building. At that time, such things were still possible. Romanchuk actively took part in our discussions and fully shared our ideas.
There was one symbolic detail in all this: among us, there was not a single photographer who had previously worked in the Soviet Ukrainian press. We had arrived as if from outside, and that may be why we looked at the world with fresh eyes.
Very quickly, each of us found our own theme. Oleksandr Glyadyelov travelled to villages in the Chornobyl exclusion zone to photograph life after the catastrophe, children affected by radiation, and the homeless who had flooded Kyiv’s streets. Efrem Lukatsky immersed himself in the world of street subcultures and criminal chronicle reportage. For the first time in Ukraine, genuine crime reportage appeared: arrests of racketeers, kidnappers, and police operations. Yurii Tugushev entered the world of music to document the birth of the Ukrainian rock scene.
Rita Ostrovska created a quiet, intimate history of her family, travelling through Jewish shtetls such as Sharhorod and Berdychiv, and photographing the great departure of Jews to Israel, Europe, and the United States. Serhii Supynskyi became interested in a new phenomenon: the emergence of farmers amid the ruins of the collective farm system. Valerii Reshetniak continued his long-term cycle about his native village – nine years of life fixed on film.
And together, we constantly photographed the street. But we did not perceive this as an exercise in aesthetics. For us, the street was a mirror of the time, a nervous portrait of the era, a social cross-section of society. Later, Oleksandr Ranchukov published a unique book of these photographs titled Such Times.
We also responded to major historical events. After the catastrophic Spitak earthquake, Reshetniak travelled to Spitak. When the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan began after the Soviet-Afghan War, Zaporozhchenko photographed columns of soldiers at the border. We did not miss the political rallies that preceded the proclamation of Ukraine’s independence.
Around our headquarters, during meetings, people with unmistakable expressions circled constantly – KGB officers and other shadowy figures. They recorded who entered and who left.
Inside, meanwhile, life was boiling over: photographers from all over the country arrived, journalists from the United States, Canada, and the UK visited. Among them was a young journalist, Chrystia Freeland, who would later become Canada’s Minister of Finance. She published an article about our collective in The Independent.
Our apartment was always noisy: we argued, invented new projects, formulated what would later be called the new language of Ukrainian documentary photography, and discussed images. In effect, Pohliad introduced new genres into photojournalism: crime reportage, long-form photo stories, and analytical documentary photography. We photographed what the Soviet press either failed to notice or was afraid to notice. And for precisely that reason, we began to be published in Western media for the first time.
This provoked outrage from the official establishment. Once, the well-known photographer Yakov Davidzon, speaking on behalf of the Union of Journalists of Ukraine, reproached me, saying that we were disgracing Soviet photographic art by exposing social wounds to the world and that we ought to be punished for it. History, however, possesses an ironic sense of humour: in 1994, Davidzon quietly emigrated to the United States and became an honorary professor at an American university.
Our photographs travelled across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. Sometimes exhibitions were shut down on the very first day. This happened in 1988 at the Central Council of Trade Unions exhibition hall on Khreshchatyk, where the entire Pohliad collective participated in the republican exhibition The Lens Accuses, Proposes, Warns, dedicated to the 19th Party Conference. Before the opening, we invited a large number of Ukrainian journalists, sensing that the Party apparatus and trade union leaders would try to prevent the exhibition from opening. It worked: faced with the press, the Party officials backed down.
But Pohliad’s works irritated them all. We were accused of failing to depict the achievements of Perestroika, of not showing the Party’s leading role in the restructuring process, and instead presenting only the sad outcome of the Soviet Union’s existence – chernukha (Russian slang for grim or dark social realism), and propaganda of Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism. We replied that photography does not lie – it is a document of its era. This, we said, is exactly what the leading role of the Party and government looks like. After lengthy disputes, the exhibition was shut down several days later.
But there was another reaction as well. At the large Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (VDNH) in Kyiv, queues stretched for hundreds of metres. In the visitors’ book, people wrote about their hopes, fears, and dreams for the country’s future. Some even lamented that Stalinist times had passed, saying we ought to be shot. That was what the era looked like: fear and freedom, hatred and hope coexisted.
Pohliad actively communicated with other photographic groups: authors from Kharkiv and the Lviv-based group Vezha. We organised an exhibition of works by its leader, Mykhailo Frantsuzov.
Beyond exhibitions, the collective’s members were also engaged in educational work. Oleksii Levytskyi founded the first informal Academy of Photography, attracting large numbers of young people. We lectured, held practical workshops, and argued about the meaning of documentary photography. Sessions took place in various locations, most often in the Mystetstvo shop on Kyiv’s Khreshchatyk Street. Oleksandr Glyadyelov helped young photographers gain access to international photography events. Rita Ostrovska ran a children’s photography studio.
I served as curator of the first national documentary photography competition, Ukrpresfoto (1993–1995), which introduced new names in the field. The competition was organised and financed with support from the production agency Maestro and the companies Minolta and Kodak-Ukraine. It was held first at the Kosyi Kaponir museum and later at the Ukrainian House. The jury included respected photographers, artists, art historians, and journalists. Among them were Marta Kuzma, director of the Centre for Contemporary Art; Borys Cherniakov, professor at the Faculty of Journalism of Taras Shevchenko University; photographer Viktor Marushchenko; and several foreign journalists. The jury was entirely independent.
We held three competitions. The winners included Pohliad members Pavlo Pashchenko, Valerii Reshetniak, and Oleksandr Glyadyelov. Later, financial difficulties and inflation struck the sponsors, and that was the end of it. As for me, journalistic work consumed me entirely, and I no longer had enough time for other directions of activity.
By 1994, our paths had diverged. Some were already working for leading international agencies. Some emigrated. Some left documentary photography and moved into commercial work. The history of the creative collective Pohliad as an organisation ended there.
But only formally.
Because each of its participants continued to work, and together, even while barely meeting one another, we changed the photographic landscape of Ukraine. Perhaps that is photography’s true destiny: to stop a moment, and at the same time imperceptibly alter history.
