Tania D'Avignon sees people and events through the camera lens (09/24/06)

Tania D'Avignon sees people and events through the camera lens

by Peter T. Woloschuk

BOSTON - World-class photographer. Journalist. Artist. Author. Publisher. Educator. Fulbright Fellow. Traveler. Tour guide. Community activist. Plastunka. Bostonian. Kyivlianka. Lvivianka.

All of these describe Tatiana Mychajlyshyn D'Avignon, who was given her first camera at the age of 11 and who has been chronicling the world and its people, particularly its Ukrainians, ever since.

Born in Nazi-occupied Lviv during World War II to Semen and Sophia Mulkewych Mychajlyshyn, Ms. D'Avignon and her family fled the Soviet return to western Ukraine in 1944, heading first to Germany, and after the war coming to the United States and settling in Baltimore, where the entire family played an active role in the local Ukrainian community.

Although keenly interested in photography, Ms. D'Avignon had dreams of becoming a famous artist and graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art. "Unfortunately, I was my own greatest fan and supporter," Ms. D'Avignon recalled, "and even my own mother was critical of my work."

Ms. D'Avignon decided to continue her education and earned a master's degree in sociology/psychology at the Johns Hopkins University. After graduation, she spent several years working as a social worker for the city's welfare department and for the Maryland Department of Youth Services. She also helped her father, who had become the head of the Ukrainian credit union in Baltimore.

After marrying U.S. Army Capt. R. Joseph D'Avignon, she moved to Boston with him while he attended Harvard Law School. The two eventually decided to stay in the area as he began a career as a corporate attorney.

Ms. D'Avignon quickly gave birth to two children, but at the same time worked in the local Ukrainian community, serving as the director of the School of Ukrainian Studies at Christ the King Ukrainian Catholic Church, as head of Plast in Boston, as branch president of the Ukrainian National Women's League of America, and as a major supporter, photographer and unofficial hostess for the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI).

She served on the Ukrainian American Committee of Greater Boston for the Commemoration of the American Bicentennial and she was one of the founding members of the Ukrainian American Professionals Association of Boston.

In the late 1960s Ms. D'Avignon wanted to visit her homeland and was one of the first Americans to get a visa for independent travel in the Ukrainian SSR. Within a short period of time she was leading tours to Ukraine for Scope Ukrainian American travel agency and also served as a private guide for various American journalists, including those from Earth Watch.

In 1986 she became a consultant to National Geographic and traveled widely with a team in Ukraine, producing a number of articles over the next six years. She also escorted journalists and writers to the Chornobyl dead zone, including Martin Cruz Smith, the author of "Gorky Park," who was working on a book about Chornobyl titled "Wolves Eat Dogs."

During all this time Ms. D'Avignon had also been mastering her photographic skills, attending courses whenever possible and taking literally thousands of pictures. "I think that I got my desire to be a photographer from my mother, who had belonged to a photo club in Lviv. She had her own camera and probably would have been more serious about photography but at that time it was not an acceptable career for a woman," D'Avignon noted.

In addition to recording purely personal and familial events and milestones, Ms. D'Avignon took pictures at various community and HURI events, and served as a freelance photographer for The Pilot, the weekly newspaper of the Archdiocese of Boston, which has a circulation of more than 150,000.

Ms. D'Avignon developed a style uniquely her own, concentrating on people and their expressions to tell her story. "I believe that my photography is an outgrowth of my art," Ms. D'Avignon insisted. "I am still an artist, only now I use a camera and a lens instead of a palette and brushes."

"I believe that every person and place is unique, that each has its own beauty and that every single thing in this world is constantly changing," Ms. D'Avignon continued. "Through my camera I can capture and preserve these transitory phenomena for all times, as well as the real person. And I find my task challenging, compelling and terribly exciting."

"That is why I spend so much time concentrating on people and their expressions," Ms. D'Avignon said. "I try to keep my pictures natural and never posed, and give insight into the reality of human existence. It is really true that the eyes are the windows of the soul."

Ms. D'Avignon's work has been well received nationally and internationally, and exhibitions of her work have been mounted in Kyiv, Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Rivne, Chernihiv, Chernivtsi, Odesa, Symferopol, Mykolaiv and Poltava in Ukraine, New York, Baltimore, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Krakow, Miensk and Priashiv (Slovakia). An exhibition of her Orange Revolution photos was displayed near her home at Boston College.

Hundreds of her photographs have appeared in national publications and various photographic anthologies. The World Encyclopedia published her book "Christmas in Ukraine" in 1997 and Alternativ published "Vse Pro Kyiv" in 2001. Ms. D'Avignon was the first woman and foreign national to be invited by the Soviet Ukrainian government to exhibit her works in Kyiv in 1989.

She was named the Outstanding Alumna of the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1990 and was listed in the Encyclopedia of Artists in 1997. In 1999 Ms. D'Avignon won the award for the best book in Ukraine for her photo album "Simply Ukraine - Prosto Ukraina" and was the semi-finalist for the prestigious Shevchenko Prize in Journalism for that book the same year.

Beginning in 1998 Ms. D'Avignon began to publish a series of annual calendars featuring her photographs of the various regions of Ukraine and their people, and in 2002 she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to document the impact on Ukrainian women of the transition from the Soviet Ukrainian state to independent Ukraine. In doing her research she photographed women in all 24 oblasts of Ukraine, as well as in the Crimean Autonomous Republic.

Most recently, she has begun photographing working Ukrainian women outside of Ukraine, particularly in Italy. She has also photographed the leading women in Ukraine today, including the wives of all three of Ukraine's presidents.

"Today's Ukrainian woman is in an impossible situation," Ms. D'Avignon said. "With the collapse of the old system, fewer women are going for higher education. There are fewer women in government and the professions, and politics is now almost completely dominated by men," she added.

"Because of the grim economic reality, hundreds of thousand of Ukrainian women have been forced to look for work outside of Ukraine in order to sustain their families. And, ironically, in doing so, they open their families to all of the negative problems of contemporary society," Ms. D'Avignon pointed out. "The bulk of the Ukrainian labor force outside Ukraine is composed of women, and no one is doing anything to help them."

Eventually Ms. D'Avignon will publish a major book on her work: an exhibition of some of her Fulbright photos was shown in Kyiv at the Tychyna Museum this past spring.

Ms. D'Avignon does not limit herself exclusively to Ukrainian topics and in August was a guest of the Chinese government in a special program co-sponsored by the Central University for Nationalities, the Municipal Government of Shi Lin Nationality County, China Pictorial of Nationalities Magazine, the Yunan Photographers Association and the Shi Lin Tourist Administrative Bureau.

While in China, Ms. D'Avignon photographed the well-known stone forest and got the opportunity to go into some of the remote areas of Yunan Province and photograph small villages and some of the members of the 26 minorities in the region who still wear their ethnic dress and carry on their age-old traditions.

"Traveling in today's China reminded me of traveling in Ukraine in the 1980s," Ms. D'Avignon noted. "It was clear that there were at least two undercover agents with our group. Much of what we could do was clearly staged and managed and a lot of our stops didn't make sense. However, we were allowed to see some very poor and backward areas and not just the Potemkin scenes that were forced down our throats in Ukraine."

Just back from a mini-vacation and photo shoot in the Bahamas, Ms. D'Avignon leaves for Kenya in three weeks. Her goal is to spend some time in the game preserves and areas where the indigenous peoples carry on their traditional way of life.

Ever the professional, Ms. D'Avignon has adopted the motto "Have camera, will travel."

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