Darya.
Beak in the air| N° d'inventaire | 26884 |
| Format | 20 x 21 |
| Détails | 228 p., numerous black and white photographs, publisher's hardcover. |
| Publication | Marseille, 2022 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782367441719 |
Appearing in the late 1990s and exploding in the early 2000s, the badanti phenomenon remains very present in Italy, where it is currently estimated that there are more than 1 million care workers, women from Eastern Europe (mainly Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania), who left after the economies of these countries collapsed. These women generally do not have regular employment contracts and work six days a week, at least 11 hours a day.
Jane Evelyn Atwood, who is well-known for her interest in people living on the margins, followed one of them for several months in 2007. Arriving from Ukraine on a tourist visa, Darya works in Bolzano, with four elderly and very physically impaired sisters. From morning to night, she takes care of them—care, hygiene, washing, meals—as well as the house, shopping, and cleaning.
Once a year, sometimes twice, Darya returns to her village in Ukraine, where her husband, Igor, and her two daughters, both in their twenties, await her. The reunion is moving, but each trip reveals a little more of the growing gap between Darya and her family. The money Darya sends transforms the house and considerably improves the family's standard of living, turning to a consumer society, while Darya lives frugally in Italy and seems to have other values. What will happen when the time comes for her to retire and return home?
With her characteristic empathy and rigorous approach, Jane Evelyn Atwood has chosen to describe in detail Darya's unchanging daily life, capturing her every move as closely as possible, following her from morning to night in her household chores and the care she provides to the elderly. The book deliberately chooses not to hide any of these often tedious stages, to better highlight throughout the pages the repetition, monotony, heaviness of routine and physical difficulty inherent in the life of a badante . Yet Darya never seems to complain and the photographs show how attentive she remains to everything she does.
The interest of this series also lies in the fact that the photographer followed Darya during a short stay in Ukraine, where she reunited with her husband and daughters. This confrontation with her origins is moving in the sense that it makes us measure Darya's trajectory and reminds us of all the social and emotional complexity of migrations, which in no way obscure the singularity of life stories.
As a great photographer nourished by the teachings of American documentary photography, Jane Evelyn Atwood has, as usual, written a text to accompany her photographs. In a beautiful, simple and unaffected style, she enriches her story with words, providing both some details about Darya's life and working conditions, but also delivering her personal point of view as a photographer through a detailed analysis of what she observes, in Italy as well as in Ukraine. Because beyond what Darya reveals to us about the life of a badante and the resulting realizations, this book is also an encounter between two women, one American and the other Ukrainian, who each in their own way have chosen to be interested in others.
Appearing in the late 1990s and exploding in the early 2000s, the badanti phenomenon remains very present in Italy, where it is currently estimated that there are more than 1 million care workers, women from Eastern Europe (mainly Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania), who left after the economies of these countries collapsed. These women generally do not have regular employment contracts and work six days a week, at least 11 hours a day.
Jane Evelyn Atwood, who is well-known for her interest in people living on the margins, followed one of them for several months in 2007. Arriving from Ukraine on a tourist visa, Darya works in Bolzano, with four elderly and very physically impaired sisters. From morning to night, she takes care of them—care, hygiene, washing, meals—as well as the house, shopping, and cleaning.
Once a year, sometimes twice, Darya returns to her village in Ukraine, where her husband, Igor, and her two daughters, both in their twenties, await her. The reunion is moving, but each trip reveals a little more of the growing gap between Darya and her family. The money Darya sends transforms the house and considerably improves the family's standard of living, turning to a consumer society, while Darya lives frugally in Italy and seems to have other values. What will happen when the time comes for her to retire and return home?
With her characteristic empathy and rigorous approach, Jane Evelyn Atwood has chosen to describe in detail Darya's unchanging daily life, capturing her every move as closely as possible, following her from morning to night in her household chores and the care she provides to the elderly. The book deliberately chooses not to hide any of these often tedious stages, to better highlight throughout the pages the repetition, monotony, heaviness of routine and physical difficulty inherent in the life of a badante . Yet Darya never seems to complain and the photographs show how attentive she remains to everything she does.
The interest of this series also lies in the fact that the photographer followed Darya during a short stay in Ukraine, where she reunited with her husband and daughters. This confrontation with her origins is moving in the sense that it makes us measure Darya's trajectory and reminds us of all the social and emotional complexity of migrations, which in no way obscure the singularity of life stories.
As a great photographer nourished by the teachings of American documentary photography, Jane Evelyn Atwood has, as usual, written a text to accompany her photographs. In a beautiful, simple and unaffected style, she enriches her story with words, providing both some details about Darya's life and working conditions, but also delivering her personal point of view as a photographer through a detailed analysis of what she observes, in Italy as well as in Ukraine. Because beyond what Darya reveals to us about the life of a badante and the resulting realizations, this book is also an encounter between two women, one American and the other Ukrainian, who each in their own way have chosen to be interested in others.