The Day’s photography exhibit recently opened in the village of Olhopil in Chechelnyk raion, Vinnytsia oblast. The show was launched on June 12 in the raion center of Chechelnyk, but at the request of the residents of Olhopil, some of whom saw it there, it moved to their village, closer to the home of Pavlo Kalenych. Thanks to this businessman, the show has been displayed throughout Vinnytsia region.
“It’s been a long time since our Palace of Culture has seen such public excitement,” director Yurii Matsko confesses. “The so-called ‘village telephone’ — not the radio or television — is the main means of communication in this area. This kind of promotion is much more effective. Proof of this is that most of the visitors who attended the photo show already knew the specific location of particular photographs.”
Maria Kyforenko, director of the local museum, visited the exhibit. She was interested in all the photos, but particularly in Hnat. She worries about the future of the new generation and this photo is a symbolic one to her.
Oleksandr and Natalia Miziriichuk came to see the exhibit on their wedding day. It is no surprise that the newly-married couple’s favorite picture was A Modest Ukrainian Wedding. Oleksandr told all the people at home to visit the exhibit because he thinks it reflects our life as it really is. And it is always useful to look at oneself through a photographer’s eyes. Another visitor, Valerii Shpylvy, nicknamed Sailor Morelia, also enjoyed looking at the pictures. No surprise there: he is portrayed in several of them, which he proudly pointed out to his friends.
Over a period of two weeks villagers, who somehow managed to leave their daily work for a while, as well as schoolchildren and students who had come to visit their grandparents for their summer vacations, flocked to the photo show. Some of the young people wrote about their impressions in the guestbook: “We are very impressed by the exhibit and delighted to be able to see it in Olhopil. We thank Larysa Ivshyna for the books Ukraina Incognita and Dvi Rusi, and we are looking forward to reading other books from The Day’s Library Series.”
The end of the exhibit coincided with a regatta, which was also organized by Kalenych, a businessman who never stops amazing his colleagues and friends. This time, to give local farmers a break from all the problems that afflict them like a hail storm, he organized a sports competition that compared well with the Olympic Games in terms of nervous tension. Teams from the Insakharprom-K group of sugar refineries based in Kotovsk and Zaplazk and the Olhopil Agrarian Company’s team competed in canoe rowing, swimming, volleyball on water, and a pelmeni dumpling — and beer-drinking contest.
There were real coups. According to the head of Insakharprom- K, Dmytro Boiarynov, “Everyone was a winner.” Before the sports competition all the teams visited the photo show. Boiarynov was also very impressed by The Day’s photo exhibit, which portrays politicians, celebrities, and closer to home, ordinary Ukrainians.
Mykola Riabokuchma, the former mayor of Haivoron (Kirovohrad oblast), and his friend Viktor Zemnorii, the photo correspondent of the newspaper Haivoronshchyna, were surprised to see such a professional photo exhibit in Olhopil. Zemnorii gave high marks to the quality of the displayed photographs and the wide range of genres and subjects. He especially enjoyed reading the photo captions.
The favorite photograph of Volodymyr Chubaryk, director of the Vinnytsia-based branch of Haben Company, was Borys Korpusenko’s photo Life Goes On, and if life goes on, it should be filled with interesting events. This is what The Day and Pavlo Kalenych have done: they have helped people who cannot travel to big cities to see this photo exhibit feel as though they are in the swing of things.
