kitchen talk: The Image as Witness – Documenting Belarusian Interiors

Background and context

Documentary photography is a form of journalism, and images have a language of their own, one capable of capturing what resists being put into words and moving through spaces inaccessible to written reporting.

Over the past 60 years, Belarus has undergone rapid urbanisation that has reshaped its demographic and cultural landscape. Today only a quarter of the population lives in the countryside and many villages are either depopulated or abandoned entirely. The traditional Belarusian village is disappearing, and with it a visual culture shaped by Soviet collectivisation, wartime devastation and the upheavals of the post-Soviet decades.

The Traditional Interior series grew from an observation Andrei Liankevich first made a decade earlier while working on his book Pagan: that the colours, texture and domestic detail of village life were vanishing from view. As the older generation passes away, houses are cleared and renovated. The family photographs, embroidered towels and painted carpets come down.

The project is rooted in personal memory and childhood. That combination of the intimate and the documentary, the personal and the collective, is what gives the images their weight. After all, to photograph what is quietly disappearing is to insist on its importance.