I met one of my heroes this week at a talk in downtown DC.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya is the Belarusian opposition leader in exile. You could call her the president in exile, as she is widely seen as having won the election against Belarus’ longtime authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, in 2020 after she stepped in as a last-minute replacement candidate for her jailed husband (whose picture she carries everywhere). She was a complete political novice but won convincingly according to neutral observers.
It was a stunning victory but only the beginning of a long, ongoing saga for herself and the country.
Lukashenko refused to admit defeat, even as hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets for months in the COVID summer of 2020. They were so beautiful, both graceful and tough, and stoic as Belarusians tend to be. This was their moment, their ‘color revolution’ (white and red, the national colors) that I thought wouldn’t happen in my lifetime. The regime teetered. Surely they couldn’t beat or arrest everyone into submission.
But that is exactly what happened.
One of the most stirring recent examples of people power was brutally and systematically crushed. Tikhanovskaya, the mother of a young child, was forced into exile in Vilnius. Ever since, she has led a kind of opposition cohort from abroad, meeting regularly with heads of state to keep Belarus on the international radar.
She says she is hopeful that the Trump administration will use its influence to help free what are now thousands of political prisoners in Belarus.
Meanwhile, she hasn’t seen her husband in five years, and she said he has been held incommunicado for the last two. She doesn’t know where he is.
I was able to speak with Tikhanovskaya after the event briefly, introduced by one of her close aides I know personally. He was at the launch of my photobook The Waiting Room in 2012 at the former Montserrat House in DC. The guy in the tie in the crowd shot:
The last time Tikhanovskaya was here a few years ago, I made sure someone delivered a book copy to her, and it’s since been spotted in the ‘waiting room’ of her office in Vilnius. She and I agreed I would try to visit the office when I’m in Europe over the summer.
I’ve been told my photobook is the first to focus on Belarusian culture and identity, which to me is at the heart of their post-Soviet geopolitical predicament, somewhat stuck (literally and metaphorically) between Russia and the West. Not Russian, not European.
So much of what’s going on - in Belarus, the US, and elsewhere - boils down to a battle for culture.
I’m actually wary of didactic ‘activist art’ and even the old warhorse ‘creating awareness’. We are usually all too aware already, the question is what to do. For me, there are ways to make a difference as an artist: how you portray human values, do you elevate and energize people or demoralize them, do you plant the right seeds in the right places, can you take an interest - even a passionate one - in something outside yourself. In a way, through art we help create the world we want to live in.
I’ve always tried to uphold all that in my own work, and nowhere more than in Belarus. People ask me why, do I have ancestry there or something? (No) As I told Tikhanovskaya, I went there because I was curious, I kept going because I started to care, and I made my book because I wanted other people to care.
And for Belarusians to feel seen and to see themselves. It was like discovering a place that hadn’t been shown a mirror before, and the blinds were drawn on the windows.
Besides photographing there on several trips from 2000-2009, my Belarus-related collabs include:
2001 - Exhibition in Minsk with Czech photographer Karel Cudlin as part of our ‘Seeing-Eye’ project, and a workshop that focused on developing Belarusian documentary photography which barely existed then (it does now). The importance of the critical observer in repressive societies.
2003 - Second exhibition in Minsk on an ArtsLink grant, showing my work from Belarus and the US. Interestingly, I got some state media coverage, which generally seemed to see my work as warmer toward Belarus than toward the US.
2006 - Curated and co-organized the Chernobyl20 exhibition, featuring the some of the best photography about the human aftermath of the 1986 nuclear disaster. We had Paul Fusco, Lucian Perkins, Robert Knoth, Gabriela Bulisova, and more. The show opened at the UN on the day of the 20th anniversary, after a special UN assembly on Chernobyl. Then a second opening at the Rayburn building on Capitol Hill.
2008 - Helped bring Belarusian artist Zoya Lucevich to the US for a residency, where she made a body of work that showed at the UN, a first for an artist from Belarus. Zoya has a close ancestral link to Belarus most famous national poet, Yanka Kupala, whose real name was Ivan Dominikovich Lutsevich. (If I recall correctly, her great-grandfather was Kupala’s brother.)
2009 - Invited to lead one of the inaugural summer workshops at a new independent photo school in Minsk.
2012 - Published The Waiting Room book, which won second place at FotoweekDC’s International Photobook Awards.
2013 - Talks at FotoweekDC festival, the National Press Club, and the International Center for Journalists about Belarus and my work there.
It’s a lot but so much of it I could never do now. Belarus has gotten much worse, it was repressive then but you could function. Today I don’t think I’d set foot there, I assume there’s a KGB file on me (yes, they have their own KGB). In her talk, Tikhanovskaya referred to the country as like a prison at the moment.
Talking with her aide (my friend) after the event, he said what Belarusians need is inspiration. We tossed around a few ideas and chatted more about the general importance of art and culture in the battle against oppression.
Especially now that we here in the US are moving in a similar direction, we may need each other.
On the power of inspiration, I’ll leave this on a note from Belarusian author Victor Martinovich, from his intro to my book:
A girl on a trolleybus is standing with her back towards us. We only see a wide boulevard disappearing in the distance, manicured trees on both sides. The girl has a light summer dress and is turned sideways to the observer. We can tell that she is beautiful but also that she is not a model. The scene is not professionally staged; such scenes take place in our lives ten times a day, in a store, on the metro, during a walk home.
But it seems that you can love life again and forgive it everything just for this one scene.