The premises on the photograph A Bird and a Boy by Kateryna Dovhaliova, a 17-year-old participant in the 14th Den-2012 International Photo Competition, resembles an artist’s studio. But, in reality, it is a rural residential building. Kateryna says there are several original buildings like this in a small village of Chornohlazivka, Zolochiv district, north-western Kharkiv oblast, almost on the border with Russia. The girl calls the house wall paintings true masterpieces of folk art. Yellow-blue birds, a snowball bush, and an embroidered towel on the wall symbolize belief in a better future for the Ukrainian countryside.
On the whole, a little more than 200 people reside in this village. Some of them, who are not employed full time, only survive at the expense of their own vegetable gardens and land plots.
“Together with a group of Protestant clergymen, I visit the poor villages of our region and help people,” Kateryna Dovhaliova says. “The clergymen bring food and clothes to the underprivileged and instill spiritual values in them, while I try to photograph as much of what I have seen as possible. I want successful and well-to-do people to see via my works that there may be a different life. For example, a mother and her daughter live in a Chornohlazivka house, where I took this picture. They are poor, but still the walls of their ramshackle dwelling place are painted over very well – perhaps in an attempt to add coziness in this way. And the boy in the photo is my brother Illia. He so admired the wall paintings that he could not take his eyes off them for several minutes. What he saw astonished him…”
Together with the faithful, Kateryna also goes to the railway station every Saturday to give food to beggars. She takes a creative approach to documenting her volunteerism.
“It is important for me not only to photograph socially unprotected people and thus arouse sympathy for them. The pictures show that these people do not abandon a hope for the better,” the girl says.
Kateryna has been photographing for two and a half years only, but she confesses she has already understood that a high-quality picture is not supposed only to record the reality.
In her view, a photo is supposed to show a different reality to successful people and give a hope for a better life to the wretched.
“This is the first time I took part in the Den photo competition. I sent six works, but only one of them was displayed. It is a great honor for me,” Kateryna says. “The Den photo exhibit impressed me with its wide scale and a high level of organization. I mostly liked pictures by Den’s photo reporters Mykola Tymchenko and Kostiantyn Hryshyn. I dream of reaching their professional level. In general, I am very grateful to Den for awarding special prizes to children’s works. In my opinion, the pictures presented in the nomination ‘The World through the Eyes of Children’ are sometimes even more interesting than those made by professional photographers. The Den contest is prompting my peers and me to go on ‘hunting’ for the best and most original shot.”
