Eight Photographers – Eight Approaches

Cyril (Kyrylo) Horiszny Timeless Ukraine

People’s faces and the surrounding ambience recall these scenes of daily life. Difficult to place in time, they are taken from streets in Lviv, Odessa, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk and the Ukrainian countryside. Life, with its positive and negative sides, is social poetry across the lower-class layers of the Ukrainian population.
Both gentle and melancholy, not withholding painful issues, these images present a counter-stream to the tawdry topics about the east as often conveyed by the west. They help us understand, how despite difficult economic and social realities, Ukrainians possess incredible strength of spirit and human warmth. www.kyrylo.com

Ihor Krut Capturing the Essence
I observe people in the streets, in cafes and unbeknownst to them, they are natural actors. When I walk around with my camera, I often feel as if I am watching a theatre performance. My job is merely attending and observing and the challenge is to find the unusual and to take a photograph at the right moment.
I photograph scenes or backdrop ? posters, announcements, gates and buildings with advertisements, messages in phone booths and signs, which in themselves also contain stories and raise questions. I look for parallels and contrasts and try to stay away from the obvious.

Chris Kudryk Passages
Of all the human senses, the one that is the most vital to me is the sense of sight. when I focus on seeing, not just identifying, it takes me away form myself and into the abstract beauty of the scene, what first and foremost captures my attention are the rhythms, patterns, shapes and colours; and when everything is just so, it feels like the “eureka moment” a wonderful discovery of a perfect moment. This is what I try to capture.
However, the human experience also intrigues me. In the series “Passages” what arrested my attention was also the mystery of what? Who? Why? What is the history of this place? Why does it capture my imagination? Why does it beckon out to me? What and who is beyond this passageway?
The images in the series ?Passages? can be viewed as starting points for thought, or as abstract studies of harmony and balance.

Christine Laptuta Holga Forest Series 2006
My previous work focused on my search for serenity, where light was my inspiration and the resulting images were rendered to articulate a sense of serenity in light and space.
My current work began as an accident. The summer of 2005, l went to the Maine photo workshops to perfect my platinum/palladium printing techniques. Due to high humidity, l was forced to find an alternative project. I purchased a Holga camera and started shooting.
The camera liberated me from the constraints of control and perfection that I utilized in my previous work. It changed my way of seeing. The cameras unpredictability, its primitive and unrefined results forced me to be spontaneous and accidental.
It also gave me the opportunity to construct, rather than document my own visualization by shooting continuous frames and to build a panoramic vista of my own making.
I continue to use the platinum/palladium contact printing process for its intimacy, its delicacy and rich tonal qualities. On the other hand the panoramic vistas have also opened up my desire to see these images on a large scale, where digital prints serve their purpose.

George Nitefor c.1949(L) & c. 1952 (R)
The images you see started their voyage through time in my father?s eye; the one that was pressed to the viewfinder of a eumig 8mm movie camera on the dates as titled. Many years passed and I repeatedly viewed these captivating, shimmering, jumpy, evidence-laden testaments with ever growing curiousity. At one point, when beta was in its glory, I transferred the increasingly brittle film stock to this format, for purposes of preservation and hence was able to review it without the recalcintrant 8mm projector, which was decidely long in the tooth. But, the images were different on a monitor; it was then that questions of memory and rememberance entered the weave. Cut to the digital era. My eye needed to see, interpreted by microprocessors what was physically on the screen. Then onto the computer, imposing my bias theory, and out to the printer.
These many reworked generations are purposeful in trying to align the ever fading memories with the present truth of tenuous recollection.

Terry Pidsadny Impossible Perspectives
Impossible perspectives explore areas of the human mind involved in perception and memory. By making pictures of scenes and objects, and forcing them into geometric perspectives using computer imaging software, the intent is to emulate the way the human mind processes and simplifies visual input into two-dimensional shapes. This process is not dissimilar to the observational strategies artists use in drawing and painting. The results of this work are wild distortions and seemingly impossible perspectives.

Oleh Sirant
My photo-based work explores issues of identity, trauma, geopolitics, iconicity, agency, as well as the dialogues of photography and painting in the digital era.
My work takes a fluid and interdisciplinary approach to the creation of meaning and dialogue – informed by, and embracive of elements of staged contemporary portraiture, painting, and performativity. Working with digital media, I am interested in the positioning of the subject(s) within contemporary issues. I treat my subjects much like actors on a stage – the images are created with props, signifying dress, and carefully chosen, appropriated, created or painted backdrops.
I am interested in the interdisciplinary spaces between various disciplines. I have an interest in iconographic imagery from the contemporary socio-political sphere, and employ and combine various ?codes?, often with a sense of ambiguity, in the interests of stimulating dialogue. I am interested in metaphoricity and narrative strategies, as a vehicle for cultural (re)production. In the past, I have explored natural disasters as backdrops for staged portraits, where the subjects were asked to bring an object that they would save if they lost everything. More recently, I have explored issues of national identity, with references to domestic and geopolitical iconography in the body of work titled “FREEDOM 35”.
Courtesy of the Corkin Gallery, Toronto

Jay Styranka
I was introduced to photography at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, Ontario, Canada where I graduated in 1969. I have been shooting commmercially for the past decade and have been doing fine art printing and exhibiting. I now print and shoot digitally because the medium offers endless possibilities of expression. As film was and is important the era of digital imaging is becoming the purveyor of incredible dimension. I have used both film and digital and mixed the two for the show here at KUMF Gallery. Enjoy the prints and contact me via E mail with your thoughts.
I have exhibited in Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Miami and Paris. My prints are published in Graphis Photo-2000 and 2001 and B+W Photography Annual Awards-2005. jaystyranka@mac.com www.jaystyranka.com