Iryna Pap
Kyiv beach
The miner had a son, 1959
About the Works
Pap was a special photo correspondent for Izvestia newspaper in Ukraine which allowed her to travel through the country extensively documenting its life throughout the 1960s and the 1970s. Thematically, her archive can be roughly divided into the following categories: construction, industry achievements, top performers, international delegations and party congresses, leisure, cultural events, and personalities, Kyiv. Whereas Izvestia favored mostly her photos of top performers, she managed to capture and thus preserve for the future the after-war reconstruction of Kyiv, the beauty of its architecture, and the appearance of the whole new districts. One of the selected photos is from her photo reportage about Donbas covering the life of their miners, while the other shows a crowded beach on the bank of the Dnipro river, which until now remains a favourite summer spot for many Kyevians.
Kateryna Filyuk
About the Artist
Iryna Pap (born Freida Pap, 1917-1985) was born in Odesa into a family of Jewish-Lithuanian printers and grew up in Kyiv. Right after her graduation from the newly formed Ukrainian Institute of Cinematography in 1941, the war took Pap and her family all over the Soviet Union – from Kuibyshev (Samara) to Uzhhorod and everywhere in between. Eventually, she came back to Kyiv. Iryna’s work as a special photo correspondent at Izvestyia (from 1958 to 1971) largely coincided with Khrushchev’s Thaw – an era of major infrastructural construction, economic growth, space exploration, and the weakening of ideological tension. Iryna Pap is also well-known as a gifted educator, who in the early 1970s launched the USSR’s first professional School of Journalism. She succeeded in cultivating high professional standards, introduced the idea of peer-to-peer and portfolio reviews, and as a result, brought up the new generation of Ukrainian photographers.