The photo by photographer Yurko Dyachyshyn shows a Christmas table in the middle of a festively decorated Lviv street. The uniforms on the empty chairs are a reminder of the soldiers in captivity and missing in action. A simple and very effective image.
And the plates. Leaving an empty plate at the table for those we can't wait for is an ancient custom, and now it is returning to our homes with a new round of pain and loss brought by the war.
Focused on researching the past in my professional life, when I think about any photo, I usually start digging into the corners of my memory (let's call it a ghost hunt). Documentary teaches us to learn and tell about the world through metaphor and detail, we always come back to this, it's like a foundation. No one in my life has ever felt metaphor as well as the woman who was born at the end of the war, at a time when all her sisters and brothers had already been killed by hunger, explosion, or terror. She, this woman, and then just some unimagined person, was planned as a new day, as a new joy, a new light, as someone who would live a life for the five people she had lost, even though she apparently barely managed to live her own. However, perhaps, feeling this burden of unlived lives, she learned to hear the world more deeply, knew how to follow symbols, signs, and, of course, metaphors, and I, fortunately, could learn this from her every summer.
That woman always put down empty plates.
The deceased sat at the same table with her three times a year: on their birthdays, one by one, then all together on one of the less busy days during the green holidays in June, and always at Christmas. At first, she set out a plate for each person, but over the years she began to set one for each of them, because she had nowhere to get a table that long, and no way to extend her kitchen enough to invite everyone she wanted to treat.
If she hadn't lost her mind today and was wandering around in the first decades after the war (not this one, of course), I would take her through the Christmas streets and show her how many empty plates there were! And if she hadn't lost her mind, she might have answered: “Never have so many of us gathered at one table like today.” The dead have many things to do, she would have said, or she had said so before, but on nights like this the gates are open for only one dinner. Both the living and the dead are looking for a time to come together in the bright time of a new birth, in the bright time not of victory but of faith in its possibility, to rejoice and mourn together.
Photo: Yurko Dyachyshyn
Text: Vira Kuriko
The photo by photographer Yurko Dyachyshyn shows a Christmas table in the middle of a festively decorated Lviv street. The uniforms on the empty chairs are a reminder of the soldiers in captivity and missing in action. A simple and very effective image.
And the plates. Leaving an empty plate at the table for those we can't wait for is an ancient custom, and now it is returning to our homes with a new round of pain and loss brought by the war.
Focused on researching the past in my professional life, when I think about any photo, I usually start digging into the corners of my memory (let's call it a ghost hunt). Documentary teaches us to learn and tell about the world through metaphor and detail, we always come back to this, it's like a foundation. No one in my life has ever felt metaphor as well as the woman who was born at the end of the war, at a time when all her sisters and brothers had already been killed by hunger, explosion, or terror. She, this woman, and then just some unimagined person, was planned as a new day, as a new joy, a new light, as someone who would live a life for the five people she had lost, even though she apparently barely managed to live her own. However, perhaps, feeling this burden of unlived lives, she learned to hear the world more deeply, knew how to follow symbols, signs, and, of course, metaphors, and I, fortunately, could learn this from her every summer.
That woman always put down empty plates.
The deceased sat at the same table with her three times a year: on their birthdays, one by one, then all together on one of the less busy days during the green holidays in June, and always at Christmas. At first, she set out a plate for each person, but over the years she began to set one for each of them, because she had nowhere to get a table that long, and no way to extend her kitchen enough to invite everyone she wanted to treat.
If she hadn't lost her mind today and was wandering around in the first decades after the war (not this one, of course), I would take her through the Christmas streets and show her how many empty plates there were! And if she hadn't lost her mind, she might have answered: “Never have so many of us gathered at one table like today.” The dead have many things to do, she would have said, or she had said so before, but on nights like this the gates are open for only one dinner. Both the living and the dead are looking for a time to come together in the bright time of a new birth, in the bright time not of victory but of faith in its possibility, to rejoice and mourn together.
Photo: Yurko Dyachyshyn
Text: Vira Kuriko
UAPP is an independent association of professional Ukrainian photographers, designed to protect their interests, support, develop and promote Ukrainian photography as an important element of national culture.
UAPP's activities span educational, social, research and cultural initiatives, as well as book publishing.
UAPP represents Ukrainian professional photography in the international photographic community and is an official member of the Federation of European Photographers (FEP) — an international organization representing more than 50,000 professional photographers in Europe and other countries around the world.
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