Promise of Recovery, Katherine Turczans most recent photographic series, encompasses portraits, landscapes, and architectural images of the Crimean Peninsula. For generations this region, on the southern tip of Ukraine along the northern shore of the Black Sea, has been a refuge where Russian and Ukrainian workers spent summers vacationing and convalescing at local sanatoria. Promise of Recovery, as a phrase, is also a diagnosis and a look into the future based on an evaluation of the present. Included in it is a notion of transformation, that is, recovery as a process of healing and an end to suffering. But most importantly, there is something optimistic in Promise of Recovery.
Adolescence: Optimism & Transformation
Turczans portraits of young boys and girls from the Crimea possess a charismatic calm. Each of them projects a confidence and presence that belies their teen-age years. It is easy to appreciate the rapport that Turczan has established with her subjects, how she draws us to their gaze, and transmits the lingering warmth she has so carefully captured. On the cusp of adulthood, these adolescents are about to grow into their changing bodies. In their faces, Turczan sees a future that is gently reconfigured and mapped onto the wider implications for the Ukrainian nation emerging through its own growing pains.
Responding to international criticism of rampant voter intimidation and ballot-stuffing after Ukraines 2003 Presidential elections, a non-violent protest called the Orange Revolution occupied Kievs Independence Square. The Revolution and ensuing reforms threw into relief the tensions underlying Ukraines past and future. It also revealed the polarization of the population between opposing political platforms: on the one hand, those that hold onto the Soviet past; on the other hand, reformers increasingly attracted to the economic potential promised by the European Union. Visiting the Crimea shortly after the election, Turczan paid particular attention to these events and how they marked a transition point for the country. Where youth and adulthood are more or less stable states of being, adolescence is only defined insofar as it exists in proximity to something else. These young personalities draw attention to their changing bodies and development, but Turczan telescopes these notions of transformation outwards onto the regions continued recovery from the processes of political and cultural change.
Turczans optimism is accentuated by the photographs consistent lighting and temperature. In Serghei & Kitten, slivers of light dance and glow on the ground while the planes of red-orange tones radiate an ambient warmth to the edges of and beyond the frame; these colors are felt as well as seen. At the center of this are Sergheis eyes. They re-center and hold us in place but his looking is also a listening. His gaze meets ours in a dialogue that creates a conversation between him and us. As a photographer, Turczan is acutely observant of personality and character but she does more than focus an act of looking. She is an intent listener and her work tempers a moment of conversation between the audience and her subjects.
Sanatoria: Recovering Possibility
Turczans work is also in dialogue with the buildings, landscape, and history of the Crimean Peninsula. A graffiti covered rotunda, titled Pavillion, overlooks the Black Sea from a picturesque outcropping. The plaster columns are chipped and scarred from years of harsh weather and neglect, but it is still possible to read through the ruins and imagine when the pavilion was white and new. The photos of medical facilities explore the slow process of decay and disrepair: layers of paint peel off the walls, husks of buildings stand eerily empty, and fecund greenery grows untrimmed. Turczans photos of these and other buildings possess a ruined beauty that evokes a link to the Crimeas past.
In engaging with history Turczan very carefully avoids a nostalgic gloss or a glorified past. Instead, she sees an interesting inversion of architecture and the body. The sanatoria of the Crimea that provided treatment to so many for so long have aged and withered. Turczan captures the conspicuous presence of Lenins statue in an empty public square and reveals it for what it has become: a monument to a political voice that no longer has an audience. These monuments, as reminders of the past, recall another time that is no longer accessible but is, nonetheless, commingled with the Crimean present.
During my discussions with Turczan about Promise of Recovery, we talked about where Ukraine was located. Geographically, Ukraine is a country wedged on the border between Western Europe and the former Soviet Union. Turczan gestures subtly towards this liminal geography in the fashion choices of her adolescent subjects. Emblazoned with French and English words like Love and Je taime, this clothing points to an identification with Western European culture. Again, these youth are agents for a betweeness, displaying the regional tensions between East and West.
For Turczan, whose family is Ukrainian, Ukraine is more than a specific country that she has been visiting and photographing for the past 15 years. Ukraine and the Crimea are places that are linked to stories told by her parents and memories from her childhood. To Turczan these photos explore layers of the Crimeas cultural history through its buildings and locations, and how they come into contact with her personal history. This concept of place exists irrespective of mapped geographical boundaries. While the Crimea is a specific region in a specific country, Turczan photos dont make any statements for knowing it. Instead, the Crimea is a place that is constantly changing, coming-into-being.
Turczans Promise of Recovery keenly observes a process of transformation by meshing the aftermath of recent Ukrainian history with an extended look at Crimean sanatoria and their communities. In paying particular attention to the future, her work makes room for dialogue amidst a confluence of people, place and history. It asks us to question our own claims to place while also considering change. Promise of Recovery is a fascinating metaphor for a healing body that is not about restitution or making things as they once were. After all, healing is generative. Turczans Crimea is a body in recovery that in its very recuperation gestures toward possibility, what is not yet there but what could be.
