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Nov. 1, 2013
Curious lens of Sylvia de Swaan
The photographer and artist investigates the personal and the collective in Chernivtsi.
SHULA KLINGER
Sylvia de Swaan was born into a German-speaking, Jewish family in Chernivtsi, Ukraine. At the time of her birth, her city was Romanian, after changing hands numerous times during – and between – two world wars. It is a city that owes its gorgeous architecture and rich cultural history to the Hapsburg Empire of Austro-Hungary. And, like so many gorgeous cities in eastern Europe, it was also the site of barely imaginable atrocities.
De Swaan was deported to Transnistria, in what is now eastern Ukraine, when she was still a baby. Her family was liberated before she was 5, she has few memories of this period. She knew nothing at all of her father, however, as he was abducted by the NKVD (communist secret police) before her birth. He never came back. De Swaan and her remaining family members emigrated to the United States in 1951, after spending six years in camps for displaced persons.
Now residing in New York, de Swaan is an accomplished photographer, artist and teacher. After beginning her professional life as a painter, an apprenticeship with Mexican photographer Rodrigo Moya persuaded to choose this as her art form.
De Swaan’s black-and-white images are stark and arresting. Combining portraiture with the approach of a documentary photographer, de Swaan captures all of the drama of extraordinary situations while losing none of their beauty. It’s a gritty beauty, however. She does not seek out ultra-slim models and pristine landscapes. Faces are often lined with age and deep in thought. They are warm, they are real and they are often confessional; they evoke empathy, not pity. The landscape may be urban or rural, domestic or industrial, and each setting is revealed with raw honesty. These qualities have been recognized in her work by numerous grants, fellowships and residencies, including funding from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
De Swaan has long held a passionate interest in her family’s past. With few of her own memories to draw on, and having lost so much at such a young age, her family story was a sparse narrative. She set out on a quest to learn what she could, to build a narrative of her own.
In 1990, she made her first trip to eastern Europe. Traveling by train, she took photographs and recorded her impressions in journals. She composed personal essays, won grants to fund her work and established herself as an author and public speaker. These early trips led to a collection of photographs taken in the area of communist eastern Europe that was once home to her ancestors.
This past summer, de Swaan spent seven weeks in the Chernivtsi area, working on the second part of her photo collection. This project is simply called, Return: A Sequel, and its title is laden with meaning. The return is, of course, literal, because the artist has made many “heart-wrenching but wonderful” journeys back to eastern Europe; but there is an ironic, rueful twist to this: how can one ever really return to a place whose culture and people have been massacred, where there are no open arms to welcome you?
In spite of this, de Swaan has enjoyed a metaphorical return to her roots. She has done so thanks to Czernowitz-L, a web- and e-mail-based community of people with connections to the city, hosted by Cornell University. Since joining this dispersed community in 2006, de Swaan has been imbued with the spirit of the place and its people. She has read about the culture, the history, the jokes, recipes, customs and many, many life stories. She found stories about the pain, the hunger, the fear and the horrors of deportation and war. She has gleaned new insights but also confirmed her impressions of her family’s life before the war, and all of this served as powerful inspiration to her creative mind.
However, it is important to stress that while de Swaan’s family history plays a large part in her creative process, her work is “not at all about genealogical research,” she said. “It’s about the metaphoric representation of memory and identity. I approach the work as an artist, not an historian.” For her, the family is simply a bridge to what she calls the unchartered “terrain of [her] ancestry.”
In Return, de Swaan offers us pictures of significant sites: the Jewish cemeteries of the Bukowina region, the city of Chernivtsi and its environs, and also its people. While many of these people are locals, others are visitors, and none more significant than the volunteers who come to the city with a purpose. These non-Jewish volunteers have traveled from all over Europe and even as far Japan, to help clear the overgrown Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi. Two European organizations coordinate the recruitment of these volunteers: SVIT Ukraine (Inter-regional Voluntary Organization) and the German agency ASF (Action Reconciliation for Peace). Some of the gravestones are weather-beaten to the point of being illegible, while others lean at all angles. The volunteers work extremely hard to restore order amid this chaos.
Has de Swaan’s Return project brought answers? Her response is qualified. Although she hasn’t found answers to specific questions about her family, her growing knowledge of the community’s collective history remains extremely valuable. She explained, “My metaphoric quest fulfilled a need for me to see the land where I was born, acknowledge the collective history of which I am a part and to make a body of work about the process.”
The editing process has helped her to make sense, to build a coherent narrative from the massive body of work she collects while traveling overseas. “My story is about memory, identity, displacement and roots – it’s about metaphor – it’s about making sense from the mass of photographs, through the process of editing.”
Of course, hers is not an isolated tale. It is part of a much larger narrative encompassing many points of view. These include the residents of present-day Chernivtsi; they include other travelers, who go there in search of their roots; they include the translators and tour guides who support the volunteer organizations; and, profoundly, the perspectives of the German descendants of the warmongers themselves.
Kate Power, an ASF volunteer from Germany, met de Swaan’s older sister in Chernivtsi recently. She describes her own search for equilibrium and peace, while living with the legacy of an awful past: “These are German hands with German tools that want to dig a path to atonement. Ready for atonement, we are entering a country that our fathers and grandfathers barreled across as masters of the imperial race.”
She relates the story of de Swaan’s family with heart-rending honesty. “Only as they returned to Chernivtsi did they see how many people did not make it. Nearly all of their relatives and friends had been murdered.”
The various narratives of the persecutor, the persecuted and the onlooker finally come together, 70 years later, through the lens of de Swaan’s camera. Brief annotations that accompany her photographs tell the viewer about the exchanges that took place between interviewer and interviewee while de Swaan clicked the camera shutter: “Georgij is 99 years old…. Once there were many Jews here – the Romanians shot some and then deported the rest. There were instances of neighbors attacking Jews in their homes with hatchets or other weapons. Many people in town live in houses that once belonged to Jewish neighbors.”
De Swaan’s portfolio is a complex and multifaceted work-in-progress. Drawn from her personal history but speaking to universal themes of displacement, loss and family, her work speaks about the need to bear witness without seeking vengeance. By bearing witness to this as a photographer, de Swaan becomes an engine for change, bridging communities and making visible the possibilities of reconciliation from behind her curious lens.
Shula Klinger is an author and artist in North Vancouver, B.C. Her young adult novel, The Kingdom of Strange, was published in 2008 by Marshall Cavendish.
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