Panoramas of the Far East by Lois Conner

The Ukraine that Turczan held in her imagination from so many family stories, many of them marked by war and tragedy, was suddenly, almost unbelievably, an independent country with a palpable sense, as she puts it, “of things loosening up”.įrom Where They Came, her collection of images, is the end result of her many subsequent visits to Ukraine over the following two decades. The attempted coup failed and, four months later, the USSR began to fragment. Her first, uncertain trip to her family’s homeland coincided with an attempt by hardline Soviet communists to oust Mikhail Gorbachev, the Russian reformist leader, in what became known as the August Coup. “But I had always imagined what my life would have been like had my family stayed there.” “Looking back, I really did not know how to grapple with it all,” she says, quietly. Her grandfather had died and both her parents had just been diagnosed with early stage dementia. In the summer of 1991, Turczan travelled to Ukraine for the first time, supported by a grant from Yale University. As he talked, he would often sketch the remembered likenesses of his lost family members on scraps of paper torn from Svoboda, or Freedom, a newspaper for Ukrainian exiles.ĭima, Lviv, Ukraine, 1991.

But my grandfather’s were the most vivid.” He told her how he had been wounded fighting the Bolsheviks, how his brother had died of typhoid during the conflict, and how he had made his way to the US, leaving behind his parents and siblings.

“My whole family were storytellers,” says Turczan, “and they created vivid descriptions of the life they had left behind. “It only took three ballerina-like leaps to cross the lawn and reach my grandfather’s screen door,” she writes in her new photo book, From Where They Came, which features evocative monochrome portraits made in Ukraine between 19.Īs a child, Turczan had listened intently to her grandfather’s stories of the country he had fled in the wake of the second world war. B orn in the US to Ukrainian parents, Katherine Turczan grew up on a farm near the town of Paterson in New Jersey.

Panoramas of the Far East by Lois Conner