How Russia’s war in Ukraine has changed photography
by Kateryna Sergatskova
The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the most documented war of all time. Thousands of photos taken by international correspondents and Ukrainians circulate in print and online. They reflect what Ukrainians endure daily, from occupation to missile strikes–but how has it changed our relationship with photography? What can we learn about photography and photographers from the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
Since February 24, Ukrainian journalists, photographers, and documentary filmmakers have been tasked with recording the Russian war crimes committed against their people. For many, it has been the biggest challenge of their lives.
On the eve of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian photographer Yevhen Maloletka and his colleague Mstyslav Chernov from the Associated Press were deciding where to go to take pictures. The decision was not easy. While foreign embassies had already left Kyiv, the Ukrainian authorities claimed that there was nothing to fear. So Maloletka decided to go to Mariupol, a city on the Azov Sea, and to the south of Donetsk. He had filmed many times before and knew the locals and the area well. After Russia surrounded Mariupol, the AP team remained the only independent group of journalists reporting on the horrors unfolding there.
Yevhen Maloletka's photographs show how the Russian army dropped a bomb on a maternity hospital, killing a woman who was about to give birth; how children and adults died in hospitals after shelling; and how a vast industrial city turned into rubble and murdered city dwellers. The photographer says that he did not expect to be in the epicenter of horror and to witness war crimes firsthand. Since escaping the besieged Mariupol, the photographer still experiences war trauma. His photos have received massive attention from the world, so he speaks about them almost daily in public in different countries; he is forced to review his photographs repeatedly. Today in Mariupol, there are no independent journalists who can show what is happening in the city under Russian occupation. This is because Russia is also at war with the independent press, especially with cameras that expose their lies. Any photos of Mariupol seen in the press since April 2022 come from photographers of Russian propagandist media or photographers who shot with permission and under the supervision of the Russian military.
Emine Ziyatdinova, who is in charge of the Photographic Archive of the War in Ukraine (Warchive), has been collecting images from photographers in different parts of the country since the first days of the Russian invasion. She says that what has happened to photography in Ukraine is unprecedented and very different from what happened during the wars in Syria or Afghanistan, where photographers from other countries, international journalists, and documentary filmmakers mostly worked. In Ukraine, a large pool of local photographers has formed since the beginning of the Revolution of Dignity and the war in Donbas in 2014. Many of these photographers came of age during revolution and war, forming their artistic approaches over the past eight years. Now, local Ukrainian perspectives have reached an international audience.
In the spring of 2022, The New York Times Magazine dedicated an entire issue to the portraits that Ukrainian photographer Oleksandr Chekmenyov took in Kyiv during the first weeks of the invasion. The project received much public acclaim, and Chekmenyov had several successful exhibitions.
“You see, this is a local photographer who lives in the same reality as his subjects. He is affected by this situation in the same way, so it resonates with the audience on a deeper level,” says Emine Ziyatdinova. “It’s the same with Yevhen Maloletka in Mariupol: he went there because he has connections with the locals, and he could negotiate with the people there to survive. He also risked his life as a Ukrainian photographer, shooting Russia’s war crimes, when Russian propagandists announced a bounty on his head.”
In his artistic practice, the Kyiv-based artist Sasha Kurmaz primarily worked in documentary photography. He has repeatedly addressed the topic of war since 2014, but never at the scale following the invasion. When Russia invaded Ukraine, the artist says, he felt paralyzed. For the first few weeks, he couldn't pick up his camera. Then he returned to his central theme, public spaces, and began to record how war changes them.
"I document everything I see around me and go wherever I can," says Sasha Kurmaz, "I try to avoid the journalistic approach and prefer to shoot how the landscape or environment has changed under the influence of the war. But the scale is incredible: horrible stories happen daily, and it is impossible to capture them all."
Sasha believes that Ukrainian photographers have a better opportunity to document different aspects of the war, unlike international correspondents who may come and go as they please. International correspondents do not have the same emotional connection to the country or local access. The permanent presence of a photographer in Ukraine provides the potential to go deeper with a story and do a long-term photo series. But at the same time, Kurmaz says, you have to worry about your survival.
The cruel reality of Ukrainian photography these days is that photographers return to the same wartime subjects again and again. Open the online galleries of international agencies like Getty Images or Associated Press, and you'll see that most photographers in Ukraine capture the remnants of missiles, destruction, corpses, and funerals. War forced wedding photographers to capture funeral processions and fashion photographers to take photos of soldiers in the trenches. The photographer couple Konstantin and Vlada Liberov were previously known for their romantic, glamorous portraits. Since the invasion, they have shot portraits of civilians and soldiers wounded by the war.
Mykhailo Palinchak never worked as a war correspondent before February 24. He spent years developing street photography, shooting protests and human stories related to self-identity and politics. After 2014 he went to work in the presidential administration as a photographer for then-President Petro Poroshenko. In 2015, he started the photo series "Negotiation Rooms," in which he captured the war in a diplomatic dimension. He met the invasion in February 2022 in Kyiv.
When the Russian army withdrew from the Kyiv region, Mykhailo Palinchak was one of the first photographers to enter the liberated territories. He saw dozens of bodies of murdered civilians on the streets and took many now well-known pictures distributed by photo agencies and international media. The photographer was completely taken aback by what he witnessed. At that time, no one knew that the Russian military was killing civilians in the streets–it was a difficult discovery for him and the entire world.
“But the hardest part was after the photos were published,” says Palinchak. “People were writing to me and asking to send additional photos because they thought it might be one of their relatives. They wanted a picture of the car’s license plate near the victim; sometimes, their worst fears were confirmed. What can you say to those people? I’ve never been in that kind of situation before. It personifies the bodies you photographed.”
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag wrote that the intensity of gazing into the photographs of war victims eventually blurs the boundaries between image and reality, as if we are all watching an endless true crime. Sooner or later, we get addicted and numbed to graphic content. This is precisely what many photographers are struggling with now in Ukraine: The intensity of Russian shelling and the number of Russian war crimes being committed daily in Ukraine force photographers to show more and more suffering. Meanwhile, they fear that the world has become accustomed to images of death. Only images filled with life can return one's focus to reality, but with constant threats against Ukraine's existence, that is near impossible.
Kateryna Sergatskova is the co-founder of the 24.02 Fund, which supplies personal protective equipment (PPE) for journalists and newsrooms around Ukraine. If you want to help keep the journalists bringing visibility to the war in Ukraine safe, please consider donating today.