Sandra Semchuk: Excerpts from a Diary by Stephen Cummings & Penny Cousineau
oblong 4to. pp. 28. b/w illustrations. single leaf with Cousineau essay loosely inserted. paperback (near fine - covers bit scuffed with light shelf-wear). New York: Mendel Art Gallery, 1982.
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First generation Ukrainian-Canadian photographer Sandra Semchuk has focused her work on the relationships between herself, her family, and her community. In 1975, she exhibited photos of the people in her hometown, Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. It was first shown there on main street where everyone from the community could stop and discuss them, before it was moved to other places. In 1980 she took part in a group show of female self-portrait photography, In/Sights. She continued to document, in black and white photography, herself and her family, creating Excerpts from a Diary (1982) and Series #10 (1982-83). Of the former, Penny Cousineau wrote: "Semchuk is careful . . . to articulate the intimate connection between herself and the rest of nature. Cyclical change is as evident in her emotive face as it is in the landscape. She celebrates the strength and power which she shares with nature and which flow through her and through the generations of women from her beloved grandmother Baba to her mother, herself and her daughter" (1982). Cousineau points to Semchuk's ties to her cultural heritage, indicating "Semchuk's strong sense of the extended family may be in part attributable to her Ukrainian-Canadian heritage. She includes family, using the photographic narrative to imply that what has taken place is a mystical revelation of a larger self." Semchuk describes herself in terms of the founding group at Photographers Gallery, "we were mainly documentary photographers, witnesses to the changes that were taking place, the demise of the older generation with their specific ways of being as well as changes to the social structures that often occurred unconsciously, without consideration of generations to come" (1997).