A Belarusian Digital Journalist and Activist
Siarhei Hudzilin has worked for international media including the New York Times as part of his diverse pursuits in truth, “fixing reality” and other storytelling. He’s interviewed here by fellow Belarusian and Reynold School of Journalism student Yulia Rajeh.
Siarhei Hudzilin established his career mostly as a photographer within the historically famous Belarusian media Nasha Niva. However, working only with a camera set some kind of boundaries to his creative nature. He also developed web design skills, writing and video filming abilities. His work was officially recognized by winning a lot of international competitions. He used to present his works at international exhibitions. His photos have been published in a number of prestigious international media such as The New York Times (USA), National Geographic Magazine (USA), Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden), The Village (Russia and Belarus), RBK online (Russia), Lenta.ru (Russia), Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland) and Russian Reporter Magazine online (Russia).
Q: How do you prefer to call yourself: a photographer, artist, or journalist?
A: In fact, I define myself based on the space or situation in which I operate.
I have chosen a common name for my activity as a digital activist — this is a kind of symbiosis or even contamination of all the media I work with. These are texts, photos, video, sound, architecture, and design. It is very difficult for me to stay in one concept. I feel too narrow in these job titles. It seems to me that the digital world, like all the tools that are available to a person, blurs this concept, and the very concept of a profession is changing every few years now.
Q: Tell us briefly about your career development. Why did you choose photography, and how did you become a journalist?
A: In fact, photography is by accident and has always been in my life. For example, I remember that in kindergarten, having just some kind of optical device in my hands, in my opinion, it was children’s binoculars. For some reason, I played a photographer, that is, I was friends with a friend whom I photographed in the game with binoculars.
Then I had my father’s Soviet Zenit camera without film in it, which I also played with. Then I got a camera in my village, also without a film, although everyone assured me that it was there, and somehow frames were obtained in my head or pictures in my imagination.
After that, there were the nineties, when mass photography penetrated into every family life. Finally, after my studies, I ended up in a certain community, probably of activists in opposition to the current government, where one of the first digital cameras appeared. And I just begged it from one of my friends and thus gained this first experience of fixing reality, and along with this, a certain journalistic part developed.
That is how we started in the mid-2000s, citizen journalism as it is now called. We wanted to come up with a website for local authorities and write about what we saw. But, of course, we did not have enough resources. That was not a professional newsroom.
This activism of mine brought some experience. I was looking for public organizations that are engaged in training and education, engaged in self-education. Thus, smoothly, gradually, over several years, I approached, probably, the professional Belarusian media level.
During my military service, I also worked as a freelance documentary photographer there. These works later won the Grand Prix at the Belarusian journalism competition. After that, I was invited to work in a Belarusian-language publication, which is now recognized as extremist (Nasha Niva). Thus, from the army, I immediately got into professional journalism, photojournalism, and documentary filmmaking.
Q: In which Belarusian and foreign media did you work?
A: It all started with the classic publication, Nasha Niva newspaper. The editorial office worked at the intersection of online and offline editing when in the 2000s there was still an archaic media market in Belarusian printed newspapers. Online journalism has not yet clearly integrated into people’s daily lives. Back then, probably, mobile journalism did not exist at all, and the Internet was perceived as a space for free expression. I was growing as a photographer and my work saw other editorial rooms. At first, these were Russian, Polish publications, that is, from those countries that border Belarus. These are the newspapers Gazeta Vyborcha (Poland), and Lenta.ru (today it is called meduza.ru). Gaining this experience, I gradually collaborated with different media publications.
Q: Could you outline the differences in the approach to work of Belarusian and foreign media?
A: Most likely, this is some kind of tradition, a tradition of journalism, the transfer of experience in Belarus. This tradition is too short, too small, and Belarusian journalism has always bordered on the political context in which the Belarusian media exists, due to unfavorable political regimes, one might say, starting from the Soviet Union, and not ending with the present time.
Freedom of expression is severely limited and, naturally, approaches to work are limited, approaches to working with a source of information, with the openness of people, with a willingness to be represented in the media, with certain personal boundaries, with boundaries of fear to see oneself from the outside, to be criticized. Naturally, today these boundaries are blurred since every person has a mobile phone with all the necessary built-in tools for photo and video production.
Thus, the differences between Belarusian and foreign journalism lie in the main approaches and principles in the business model, and ways of collecting and processing information. For us, this is rather a kind of mission and desire to change something than a profession. There are too many unwritten rules and unspoken values. And, as a result, the lack of a professional market. All this does not develop the domestic media market. On the other hand, a certain level of depression exists in Belarus. Based on this, of course, the levels of professionalism are too different.
Q: What did you do to get your work published in the New York Times? Was it the goal to get on the pages of a famous publication or did it just happen?
A: In fact, it was some kind of happy accident in quotation marks. The New York Times editorial office planned material from Minsk and the writing journalist from their side was theater critic Ben Brantley, in my opinion, the leading theater critic all over America. His photographer failed to get a visa. It was 2015, and Belarus still didn’t have liberalization back then.
Without a visa, the photographer simply could not enter the country. And the organizers themselves found me as, apparently, a person who can cope with this task. I had to send all my awards to competitions, all my work, and a list of all my achievements. This is how our collaboration began. I became a New York Times photographer in Minsk. I worked for them for several years, maybe five years providing them materials from Belarus.
So, it was not something I wanted to achieve. I didn’t desire to break into the world market. I didn’t offer my shoots, I didn’t send out too many letters. For some reason, I hoped, expected that this was some kind of natural process: when you grow in a profession, you become visible to market experts. The most important for me was to remain in the profession, to attract attention with work, and not some kind of rating.
Q: Describe the most difficult situation in your career in the process of working for foreign media (cultural traditions, concepts, which audience do you target when creating cross-cultural materials, and so on …)
A: I’ll start from the end. The audience, of course, exists in every media, and the audience, probably, depends on a certain information agenda, and this is too complicated considering a moment of manipulating the attention and opinion of the audience.
However, I have always been guided simply by my own conviction that I can show exactly what I see regardless of the news agenda. A certain global system and the main principle were important to me: the desire to show an atlas of pure life in Belarus, its diversity, its depth and to capture the visual tradition, to try to continue the experience of previous generations of visualists.
The most difficult moments in work, of course, are certain political topics that are always seen locally from within in a different way than from the outside in a particular international context. That is, the difficulty was in the perception of my work already on the pages of publications, on the pages of the New York Times. For example, in 2017, when there were protests that were quite massive for us, and against the backdrop of a world where hostilities were taking place, blood was shed there. For the world community, this was just minor indignation of the masses. And the level of emotionality that was inside this situation in Belarus was much more extreme than it seemed to the international editors, who simply asked a direct question during their calls: “Are there any victims or not? Are there any dead people?” In my opinion, this is a wild dimension of the agenda and the importance of the news.
Of course, the question of language is also important. In every country where I have worked (Georgia, Poland, Lithuania) there are always language differences, and it is very difficult to get into the context of the country, and its problems. And this is always a kind of choice: not to try to fit reality to your beliefs, but rather to explore, understand the features and reflect on your work.
There is always a temptation to treat a foreign culture in a slightly barbaric way, when some accents and details are either not noticed or ignored, although at the local level, perhaps, they are decisive. It poses a threat to the truth.
Q: Why did you choose to become a freelancer?
A: I became narrow in one media. News and life cycles began to repeat themselves and I felt that I was repeating myself, shooting the same thing. And I just got bored. I studied web design, layout, started advertising. Freelancing gives you a certain freedom of choice, although you become vulnerable to the market without having a steady income. However, my reputation allowed me to do this.
Q: Do you use modern digital technologies (for example, NFT) in your professional activities? Do you consider NFT the technology of the future?
A: I don’t use NFT yet, I’m studying it now. I exist in a very local space of the Belarusian culture, which is developing behind the global market, both for external and internal reasons. Therefore, the NFT technology itself does not penetrate into the Belarusian society as deeply as, say, in progressive countries. Although this is a promising fiture — the protection of one’s digital work on the Internet, assigning a unique code to the work. And while I’m watching it. My interest in this technology is not the first sale, but as in any art market, I am interested to follow the secondary sales. The situation there is not clear yet: how this technology works for the author. NFT resolves the issue of ownership of information — a digital pixel without any phisical carrier. This is a promising technological solution. And I’m not looking here as a developer, but as a user. It all looks beautiful, but it is not yet clear who to protect from who, when there is so much content on the Internet and it can be easily replicated and changed by a simple screenshot and the simplest free application on the phone. There is still a lot of work to be done on how to form general rules for all digital users.
Q: In your opinion, in what direction is journalism moving today? What has changed compared to, for example, the 2000s?
A: It is difficult for me to judge at the global level, I can only speak about the local market because most likely online journalism in the US in the 2000s was at the level that we approached in the late 2010s. The change is that we see too much and too close, and we care less and less about what we see. The direction is difficult — the era of post-truth and service journalism. This is a kind of devaluation of the word, truth, and blurring of empathy. A problem lies in our trust in media, digital word, digital pictures, and video. A direct source can be copied in a few seconds, the title could be rewritten, and the link could not be provided. It is very easy to upset the balance of truth and there are no tools at all to control it. Although large corporations are trying to fight fakes, it is too slow in terms of the number of digital users. The amount of news that we consume is many times greater than before. The problem is that nobody can read the news thoughtfully today. The digital services themselves, with their notifications, private messages, mix journalism, life, reality, the digital world, and this is a kind of meta sphere without a hard foothold. The way out maybe a return to traditional offline media, a reduction in speeds, but this is impossible. Rather, we need adequate content filtering tools, a new ethical approach to language, to visual language.
Q: In your opinion, is maintaining personal social networks important for journalists and photographers? Why?
A: Of course, this is an important tool in existence in a digital environment. It is necessary to exist on the Internet as a professional unit. Social networks long ago become separate media. Every journalist and photographer has their own channels through which they reach their audiences. Moreover, it is an important instrument of trust. In a situation where there are too many media organizations, the only choice left is to trust a specific person, a journalist. In this way, you can try to save the truth — when you trust not the general media, not the logo on the Twitter page, but a specific journalist. There is some hope in this personalization.
Q: What advice can you give to those who want to start a career in international and cross-cultural journalism?
A: I believe that it is necessary to start from the local level. A novice journalist should begin to describe the place where he lives: city, village, region. It is necessary to understand and adopt the experience of those people who surround him. This is the only way to expand the scope of your vision, the only way one can cultivate impartiality and respect for foreign cultures, for foreign news. Because it is very easy to take a beautiful photo in a strange place, in this way absolving the responsibility and call yourself an eyewitness of the event. However, the very act of sharing a photo can have completely different results. That’s why I didn’t take a single photo from the 2020 protests, for example. A lot of criminal cases were initiated simply on the fact of reportage photos, for which journalists received awards, as for beautiful work. And now a lot of people in Belarus are in prison just because they were photographed.
