Photographer documents life and people of Hutsul region (05/26/96)

Photographer documents life and people of Hutsul region

PHILADELPHIA - Many photographers who visit or work overseas tend to take pictures unobtrusively, photographing from a "safe" observer's distance.

But when Lida Suchy set out recently to photograph in a village in western Ukraine, she had a far more deliberate, interactive process in mind. Working with an unusual, large-format 8-by-10 camera, she deliberately chose a painstakingly slow process. Making just a few exposures with this cumbersome, bulky apparatus took her as long as two hours, requiring participation and patience on both sides of the lens. Instead of unobtrusive observation, Ms. Suchy's process created a deliberate meeting point between her and the people she photographed.

Her memorable photographs were on display through May 3 in La Salle University's Chapel, College Hall, on the university's campus in Northwest Philadelphia.

Today, a noticeable cultural revival is taking place in the Hutsul region that Ms. Suchy photographed. "Denied by authorities but not forgotten by the people, customs and traditions are emerging again," she noted.

The Carpathian region depicted in her photos has special meaning for Ms. Suchy. It gave birth to her father, Dr. Zenon Mychajluk. "Though living far removed from this region for more than 50 years, my father still refers to this region as home," Ms. Suchy said. Fleeing the oppressive Soviet system, Ms. Suchy's parents lived in displaced persons camps in the 1940s before immigrating to the United States.

"When my father arrived in America, he saw a postage stamp of a mountain goat in Montana, and that is where my family moved," Ms. Suchy said. Her father began American life as a veterinarian's assistant not on Montana's mountains, however, but on the prairies. The couple later moved to North Dakota, where Ms. Suchy was born, then to Rochester, N.Y., where she now lives.

Early in her career, Ms. Suchy practiced editorial photography, studied anthropology and earned a master's degree in communication. In 1992 she earned a master's in fine arts at Yale University.

In the summer of 1992, with the arrival of Ukrainian independence, she and her father returned to the Carpathian region he had known as a young man. The photographer's most vivid memories of her first visit include discovery of the modest house where her dad had been born in 1909, and the intensely moving experience of rediscovering the family's burial plot containing the graves of her aunt and great-grandfather. The graves had become overgrown with vines, and finding them involved a considerable search. Her father's old house had become an abandoned ruin. "The visit was sometimes a sad and bittersweet experience for my dad," recalled Ms. Suchy.

During that visit, a Hutsul family invited her to stay. Her 10-month return to the rugged Carpathian region with its severe winter climate produced a series of portraits of village people.

"I am trying to create a collective portrait of this rural community through individual portraits of its members," Ms. Suchy said. "It is also a way to confront the image of this place I built up from my father's recollections and stories with an image of my own."

In the process, Ms. Suchy and her large camera became so well-known in the village that "when I hitchhiked to get to the place where I lived, even people I had never before met knew exactly where to drop me off."

A tour of Ms. Suchy's painstakingly created pictures reveals much of the character of a people seldom visible to the outside world. Her photos hang in galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. They also hold a place of honor on the picture walls of many village households.

"The pictures are not a folklore documentary, nor are they a travelogue," she explained. "Despite their photographic verity, they perhaps reveal more about the photographer's own subjective vision than they do about the world they depict."

At present, Ms. Suchy is developing a parallel photographic series of Ukrainian Americans.

A second photographic series also recently displayed at La Salle consisted of portraits of religious practitioners from the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church, photographed during Ms. Suchy's 1993-1994 residency in Ukraine as a Yale University exchange fellow.

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