Nash Holos Ukrainian Roots Radio

-An interview with Pawlina




Diane Covert is a Boston-based photographer who uses her talent & love of the craft to bring attention to genocide and terrorism.

Diane’s work was brought to my attention by Allison Zivin at the Felshtin Society in New York. (Interview with the president of the Felshtin Society, Alan Bernstein, is here.)

The Felshtin society is an organization that is commemorating the pogroms of the early 20th century that took place in what is now modern day Ukraine and other countries once occupied by the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Soviet empires.

As a photographer, Diane sheds new light, literally, on what happened during this time. One of her three websites, called Why They Left, documents why Jews fled eastern Europe in droves during the first part of the 20th century.

She joins us now to tell us about her work and some of her fascinating discoveries in the world of photography going back a century in time, and on the other side of the planet.

Pawlina: Welcome Diane for joining us!



Diane: Well thank you for having me. That was a nice intro!

Pawlina: Oh good! Well I hope it covered everything and piqued our listeners’ interest!

Diane: I’m sure you have.

Pawlina: So first of all tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be a photographer living in Boston.

Diane: Well I was just one of those kids who wanted to be an artist. I always wanted to be an artist and it was when I went to art school—I was at Rhode Island School of Design and then later at Kansas City Art Institute—that I discovered that I loved photography. And I became a photographer. I switched from painting to photography, and became extremely interested in the documentary photography movement that was so prominent at that time.

Pawlina: And so how did you get into documenting genocide and terrorism?

Diane: That happened a number of years later. I was driving my daughter to violin lessons as a teenager. It was February 2002. And I had NPR on, which is National Public Radio in the US. They had a program on called Palestinian Women and basically they were talking about the first suicide terror attack carried out by a woman. But they put it in this strange feminist context, and it was not my understanding of feminism. It was very disturbing. I wrote them a letter in February and received my answer in August, in which they acknowledged that was not their best effort. But by then I had decided that the world didn’t really understand this idea of suicide terrorism—that you put on a suicide vest and the human being becomes the bomb, actually.



And you can go up to a group of people—anywhere in the world this can happen—for any reason. And there are always disputes. And people are always angry with each other about something. It moves around the planet, but there’s usually some dispute happening somewhere. And I didn’t think that in any way we should be tying that behavior to feminism, which I saw as certainly much more noble, or…. It’s certainly non-violent. So it made me decide that I wanted to teach people—or show people—via photography, about terrorism. Now that was an interesting problem, because although there were photographs of buses, and cafes that had been blown up, most people couldn’t tolerate looking at them. They were too anxiety provoking. Horrible.

So one day it popped into my head that I could use x-rays and CT scans. The doctors told me that—this is their word—that it’s sanitized. In other words, there’s no blood,