Born in the US to Ukrainian parents, Katherine Turczan grew up on a farm near the town of Paterson in New Jersey. “It only took three ballerina-like leaps to cross the lawn and reach my grandfather’s screen door,” she writes in her new photo book, From Where They Came, which features evocative monochrome portraits made in Ukraine between 1991 and 2008.
As a child, Turczan had listened intently to her grandfather’s stories of the country he had fled in the wake of the second world war. “My whole family were storytellers,” says Turczan, “and they created vivid descriptions of the life they had left behind. But my grandfather’s were the most vivid.” He told her how he had been wounded fighting the Bolsheviks, how his brother had died of typhoid during the conflict, and how he had made his way to the US, leaving behind his parents and siblings. As he talked, he would often sketch the remembered likenesses of his lost family members on scraps of paper torn from Svoboda, or Freedom, a newspaper for Ukrainian exiles.
