a visual dialogue

We are publishing Elena Subach’s “visual monologue” rather than A Visual Dialogue because the photos her partner submitted for A Visual Dialogue were part of a series we had already published. For this reason we couldn’t go ahead with our usual image exchange format. But it’s important to publish Elena’s work on “Home” which expresses the world she inhabits now.

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May 29, 2022
Elena
I am from Ukraine, and we have a war here.

When the war started, my life got divided into “before” and “after”. And there was numbness, the inability to use the language that existed before the war. We all had changed, everything around us became shaky, we were left without a sense of stability and security. We all had to find the new ourselves, with new ideas and new faith. I started to work harder. My approach to photography has changed. Now I think that my mission is to record this time in history of my country.

Which theme do you think we can choose?
The first thing that comes to my mind is “home”. I think about it a lot now, because I talk to displaced people a lot. To people who have lost everything. I listen to and record their stories. They say that home for them is a memory. It’s not only the place where you live, but everything that happened to you there. Home is not only the walls of your house, but also the streets you used to have romantic dates on, the place in a cemetery where your relatives lie. Home is the landscapes you saw from your window in childhood.

I see it like composing poetry: creating images as searching for rhymes, sharing emotions, telling stories to each other. I hope our small singular stories will develop into a new bigger unity: the result is more than its parts.

 I will start from a photo I took inside a house in a Pompeii archeological site, which particularly impressed me. On its walls the owners painted and sculpted interiors of another house, a more ideal one. Probably, more ideal people, or even gods, also lived there, on these walls.

 Now we see that only shadows remained from the gods, and from those who ordered this decoration — their vision of beauty.

 Interestingly, the color of the walls of that house is the same as the color of my childhood home. My grandfather used a stencil to paint ornaments on the walls so that his family could live in beauty. And although now these walls are covered with wallpaper after multiple renovations, I know that somewhere under them this beauty remained. Someday I'll go back there and recover it.

June 10, 2022
Elena:
I caught myself falling into the great world of memories, in my Home of childhood that will always be with me. Baudelaire once said that Goya’s lithographic images were “gigantic paintings in miniature”, highlighting the artists’ ability to create greatness in small things. I want to say that there is the same story with this photo, it is a poetic feature - to see (and to be able to show others) the greatness in small, simple and usual things. 

Here is a photo that has a cupboard with dishes along with other interior objects. They are not in their usual places and they are covered with plastic film; that’s why their function disappears. Instead, they are transformed into something different, perhaps the tip of an iceberg of some new story. But this is not a story where the mysteries are solved, it is a story that is passed on, like I am passing it on to you now.

June 17, 2022
Elena:
I am sending two pictures. The first one was made as an answer to the colours. I only managed to find something vaguely similar to your colour palette at a market.

There were knives for food carving with examples of what could be done with simple products like carrots, onions and cucumbers.  It seemed strange for me, the purple onion flowers looked dangerous and aggressive. They were like aliens awaiting for the guests to show their true nature.
And that's why I made a second picture - with the hand and the stars symbolizing protected sky.

I realize that I am sharing my own projections, about feeling in danger and wishing to be protected. I believe the entire Ukraine, my home, lives with these feelings now.

June 23, 2022
Elena:
The word "escape" conjures up very different associations for me. It has to do with reality.

I am currently working on a project to record the stories of people who fled the war, their homes often destroyed, the places where they lived wiped off the face of the earth.

One guy who managed to escape from Mariupol told me:

“It is very hard to depict everything that is now going on in Mariupol, where I had lived 20 of 22 years of my life. Ruins - is not the word that may describe it. Ruins means something is broken. But everything is completely destroyed. The shells and missiles struck the buildings for a second, third, fourth time, disintegrating them into dust. The city was leveled to the ground, and this is not a hyperbole.

It took a lot of courage or fear to start walking or driving out of the city. After all, there are a lot of those who managed to save themselves, and we are still there in our minds. Because in order to really get out of Mariupol, one needs to throw away everything old. One needs to become a new person.“

I want to share the portrait of a woman who managed to escape from Mariupol with her family only in early June.

June 26, 2022
Elena
Today is deadline day and this is my last letter to you in the Dialogues.

I thought a lot about why I continued to take pictures at a time when everything seemed to be ruined and ordinary life had turned into chaos. When all activities other than helping people lose their meaning. And I realized that the great benefit of being an artist is that you can reassemble your world. This is the good of creation. Understanding this gives me a great sense of gratitude. The need to take photographs was akin to a child learning to speak. By learning the name of an object, the relationship of a word to a thing, a child learns, constructs reality for itself. In contrast to all the destruction the Russians have brought us, the desire to create and protect has only grown stronger. And I know that all Ukrainians have become very strong now, too. There's another very important point here. Only when you know that you can lose something can you fully appreciate what you have.

I want to share two pictures. The first is a nest, I recently found it under a tree, I hope that the chicks have already had time to grow and leave it. I was looking at the amazing construction of branches and thinking about its fragility and at the same time power. It is difficult to imagine how a bird literally shapes its house with its body. Before us is the result of thousands of blows of the bird's breast against the walls of its dwelling, only in this way do the disparate sticks turn into a compressed monolith.
And the second is a collage, which is very much in tune with my feelings right now. Freud talked about how fragments of the unconscious constantly fill our consciousness. I think this is just a picture assembled from such fragments. But as I see it, it has a direct bearing on the theme, that of Home.

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