To Grow Up During War and Come Of Age Amid Revolution
Photographer Daro Sulakauri has spent her working life documenting waves of protest, the latest chapters of Georgia’s complicated rise from history
The revelations were shocking. Clips of prisoners being beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted premiered on national TV and spontaneous protests erupted across the country. People demanded that the president step down. They squared off against a police force which had routinely, with brutal force, suppressed public outcry in the past.
The filmed abuses at Gldani Prison in 2012 were one more manifestation of an authoritarian government rife with dysfunction. The timing of their release couldn’t have been worse for Mikhail Saakashvili, the president at that time. After a revolution, Saakashvili’s attempts to stabilize the country and tackle corruption sparked accusations of politically motivated power-grabs. Georgians felt Saakashvili was nurturing a police state. Parliamentary elections were on the horizon, and no matter how many low-level officials were rounded up or how many ministers resigned the citizenry were poised to vote for wholesale change.
Daro Sulakauri wanted change too, but she took to the streets, camera in hand, for very personal reasons.
“I was very upset with the situation,” says Sulakauri. “I had cousin and people I knew from childhood in the prison, so you can imagine what I felt. I didn’t try to detach myself, but rather the opposite.”
Modern history hasn’t been kind to this nation of five million, seated at the crossroads of continents and culture. The 20th century was marked by Russia’s regional domination, then by post-Soviet traumas including coups, civil war, revolution and invasion. Today news reports focus on Georgia’s problems integrating into Europe.
This rocky history is also Sulakauri’s, making her a crucial interpreter of her country’s inner-workings. As a little girl in Tbilisi she listened as gunshots exploded outside the window, lived through blackouts and water shortages, and watched as Abkhazia and South Ossetia wrenched themselves free.
As a grown woman Sulakauri has covered the upheaval of a nation struggling to overcome its Soviet legacy, and the invisible communities isolated or displaced by ethnic tension and war.
“We were living so long under dictatorship that we had forgotten how to survive independently,” she says. “I think that now we are having this dilemma. We finally gained independence but now we don’t know how to handle it, so we are struggling and it is this process we are dealing with now.”
Decades locked behind the Iron Curtain, followed by decades of instability, have left Georgia underdeveloped. It’s hard to make a living as a photographer, the path Sulakauri has pursued ever since watching her older sister run around with a camera. Her early work found its way to some group exhibitions and attracted enough attention to land her some assignments. It was an auspicious beginning but to take the next step she felt it necessary to fly back to New York — where she spent part of her childhood — to study at the International Center of Photography.
America might be a land of opportunity but Tbilisi is where the heart lies. She returned to Georgia and shot her first project Terror Incognita, which focused on Chechen refugees crossing the border to escape brutal Russian anti-insurgency campaigns. The work earned awards from Magnum and Photo District News.
International accolades are nice, but they also present the only opportunities in town — most of her editorial assignments from from foreign press. The environment is dismal for any creative endeavors. Sulakauri sees arts and culture as one of the country’s most valuable resources, a major building block for the nation’s development, but she doesn’t see anyone investing in it.
“We have talented photographers and journalist, as well as artists in Georgia,” Sulakauri says. “There are also many talented young people who are unable to develop themselves due to a lack of good educational programs, money, jobs, and language barriers.”
The arts may lack nurturing but journalism carries a unique burden. International organizations have criticized Georgia for a lack of press freedom. Sukakauri sees hope in the growing number of independent newspapers, radio programs and online journals offering alternative viewpoints, but the media landscape remains far from perfect.
The West may not suffer imposed restrictions but a general lack of understanding hasn’t helped tell the full story of life in Georgia. Outsiders never seemed to have any idea why the election of 2012 that toppled Saakashvili was such a profound moment.
“I think the international media never fully grasped what was going on in Georgia after the Rose Revolution,” she says. “We lived in a police state. Freedom of speech did not exit. You could have lost your job if you criticized the government. It was a total dictatorship.”
At the same time Sulakauri understands that it’s impossible for anyone, from a professional journalist to a vacationing tourist, to really grasp a place in a short period of time. And there are places inside the country’s borders that were completely foreign to her. The project Double Aliens took her deep into an entirely different facet of Georgia’s complicated history.
The Samtskhe-Javakheti region lies alongside the Turkish and Armenian borders. Few people from Tbilisi bother to take the crumbling 200km of road from the city into this isolated rural area. Residents grapple with high unemployment, governmental neglect, and simmering tensions that go back for generations.
Only 23% of the population is ethnically Georgian. They live segregated from their Armenian neighbors in separate towns, attending separate schools, and speaking separate tongues.
Georgia and Armenia went to war over the land as it was abandoned by the receding Ottoman Empire, only to be unified when the Soviet Union swept across the Caucuses.
According to Sulakauri, today’s Armenian residents resent the Georgian nationalism which arose during the country’s push for independence, while the Georgians fear Armenian sentiments toward secession.
“Samtskhe-Javakheti is a highly sensitive playground for an ethnic conflict and dwellers of this forgotten place are not hesitant to play,” Sulakauri says. “Since both parties feel this area of southern Georgia is their rightful homeland they are not willing to make peace.”
Growing up during wartime, coming of age during revolution, and working through successive waves of protest against the government has inured Sulakauri to conflict. She feels that the hardships she endured brings her closer to the Chechens, Armenians, and Georgians displaced by the violent breakaway of South Ossetia whom she has photographed.
The difficult climate be damned; Sulakauri is sticking with her camera. Her family is made up of artists and the compulsion to create is in her blood, regardless of the marketability of what she produces. And she continues to focus her lens on her country, blending its overarching social issues with her own personal history.
“Recently I got a grant from Human Right House for my project Early Marriages in Georgia,” says Sulakauri.
At 17-percent, Georgia has one of the highest rates of early marriages in Europe.
“Early marriage is a very delicate issue in Georgia and society ignores it or doesn’t talk about it. Some people don’t even know that it exists. When I was very little I remember how my two classmates were married at age 13 and 14. I didn’t really know what it meant, but it affected me emotionally. The topic is very important for me. I too was a kid once.”
Despite all of the difficulties afflicting her native land from the capital to the borders Sulakauri loves Georgia. Even if she’s sometimes based in New York and travels frequently, Tbilisi is always home.
Georgia can improve. Sulakauri would like to see changes to sentencing laws for drug offenses, better access to housing and medical care and the ability to travel, but progress is happening. Maybe the government in power doesn’t know what it’s doing but it’s not the evil regime of yesterday.
Daro Sulakauri is a freelance photojournalist and stringer at Getty Images. Her work has been published in Mother Jones, the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, New York Times, the Economist, and Forbes Magazine, among others. Sulakauri graduated in 2006 from the International Center of Photography’s Documentary Photography and Photojournalism Program and in 2008 from the Department of Cinematography at Tbilisi State University.
