The First International Photo Shop opened in Rivne’s House of Scholars. Among its participants is Oleh Ohorodnyk, one of the prizewinners in The Day’s Day of Millennium photo contest.
There are two things registered by the photographers’ cameras that strike you most of all in the exposition. First is the world’s fascinating diversity: a caravan making its way wearily through the desert painted in red by the sunset; an ancient Chinese temple at a mountaintop looking like a magic toy; deer in snow-covered Yellowstone Park; white swans at a lake in the Austrian Alps blending with the twilight; a mountain valley in the Carpathian Mountains covered with a scarlet and green carpet of poppy. Second is what unites this world: man — loving, hopeful, laughing and crying, earning his daily bread by the sweat of his brow.
There were two works that stuck in my memory: Human Road Map by Val Goretsky (USA) and The Paintings of Time by Prabir Mukherjee (India). Both portray old people of approximately the same age, 70-75. They lived their lives in different ways, in the most different of countries, and accordingly were allocated different measures of satiety and hunger, toil and rest, joy and sorrow. But there is something in their looks that unites them, some kind of wise peacefulness. Life is coming to its end, it was as it was, and nothing can be changed. A man standing on the verge of eternity should not worry about what he had not complete in his short life.
Profound philosophical undertone is characteristic for most of the works represented at the exhibition. The jury had a wide choice: over 400 authors from 51 countries took part in the photo shop. Ukraine also had a solid representation: nine of the thirty-five prizes were awarded to our photographers Oleksandr Solentsov, Roman Ratushny, Oleh Ohorodnyk, Ihor Berezhnoi, Valery Anzilov, Mykhailo Strekalovsky, Ihor Vertelkin (two prizes), and Oleksandr Suprun.
“We are well acquainted with the works of Ukrainian photo masters. They are distinguished with a very high level both in terms of art and technique,” renowned photographer Derek Slattery (Switzerland), honorable member of all the leading world art photography associations, commented on the results of the photo shop.
First prizes were awarded to Fata Morgana by Apers Marc (Belgium) in the black and white category; The Water Shed by Edmund Whitaker (Germany) in the color photography nomination, and Valery Anzilov (Ukraine) for his Lidia-3 in the water nomination. Duffelsphotokring (Belgium) won the Best Photo Club title. Ternopil-based Volodymyr Naidukh was awarded a special prize, CDs with the archive of our newspaper for the last three years, the period in which it published the works of The Day’s international photo contests participants, for his Nastia-2.
Note that the photo shop prizewinner Oleh Ohorodnyk from Lviv was also prizewinner of our two last photo contests. It is interesting that this year both juries of The Day’s contest and Rivne 2001 awarded prizes to his two works from the same Gipsy Farmstead series. Our congratulations to Oleh.
Let us recall that Rivne 2001 is the first contest photo shop that was held not only in Ukraine but in Western Europe the under patronage of the Federation of International Art Photo (FIAP), Photographic Society of America (PSA), and the Image Sans Frontiere (ISF) European Photography Union. The contestants received greetings from President Leonid Kuchma.
