On June 3 the jury announced the winners of the photo contest “Children’s Planet” hosted by Vernadsky Library. According to the organizer of the event Natalia Kompantseva, this is the only competition in the world, which presents photographs made only by female photographers. The exhibition is timed to coincide with the national holiday Children’s Day.
The photographs were evaluated in three categories: “Digital Art,” “Portrait,” and “Report.” Golden medals from the Ukraine’s National Union of Photographers and ISF for reportage photos were awarded to Oleksandr Lekovych for his social work Bench for Three and Mzia Lekveishvili from Georgia for her photo School for the Visually Impaired. The award for the best portrait was endowed to Olena Almazova for her photo Case and to Anzhela Nadezhda Portrait with Bonia. The winners in the category “Digital Art” became Russian photographer Irina Mikhailova for her photos Before the Exams and Magical Holidays and Ukrainian photo masters Olha Kuznetsova with her About Chkalov and Carousel as well as Olena Almazova with photo Phobia.
“It would be great if women could take the photos of children at all times because they feel the children better,” said the organizer of the exhibition Natalia Kompantseva. “Women’s photo is absolutely not inferior to men’s and sometimes even surpasses their work. On the other hand, women are less represented as photographers. It’s a great joy that with the development of photographic equipment they as if woke up.”
It is not easy to photograph children. Even when a sophisticated film was shot a cameraman had three meters of film to be used in order to receive a meter of useful material. In case with working with children and animals you’d need materials in proportion one to ten. But these topics always fascinated professionals the most. However, if a child is shot not in his natural environment, he starts to pose. As a result, it looks fake, according to the impressions of the participants of the current exhibition.
“Taking photographs is always difficult,” says deputy editor of the PROTOGRAPHER magazine Oleksandr ZHYLIN. “When you set up all the equipment, switch off the inner dialogue, you cease to be yourself and become a mediator of the theater of life.”
In reportage photos participants of the contest skillfully documented small scenes of life. Children who enjoy the first snow, caring mother of a newborn, mom playing with her son on a carpet. Many experienced throes of creation and Tetiana Barvinska caught this moment with her camera capturing a school student, who sits deep in thought with his mouth open in a class.
Conciseness and naturalness are the two characteristic features of the photography by Lekveishvili. She says that she gets acquainted with the people we see in her photos right on the street and quickly finds contact with them. It is easy to work with such people because they are always being sincere. Some even invite her to their home for the photo shoot to be in a familiar surroundings.
“The most interesting thing about this exhibition is its pure overt emotions,” noted Oleksandr ZHYLIN. “Every adult wants to portray something of himself, while a child stays natural. It is great if there is sensuality conveyed through a photograph, as in The School for the Visually Impaired by Lekveishvili. When I look at this photo I feel the touch of the fingertips in Braille. I feel the emotions of the girl who reads. There is a certain mystery in reading through touch because it is a different language and it is like another planet. This in itself is interesting. The main question is whether a person feels something when he comes up to a photo piece. Many of us try to find logical sense in it all. But I think that you really have to feel the photographs. If a person can let the power of a photograph in – it’s really good.”
