Inquiry into “Image-Making” in a War Zone
From far away, I hear the Cossacks’ reply Photograph taken with the help of the Territorial Defense Forces (ТРО Медіа), the 112th Brigade and soldier Roman Gribov from Snake Island, Ukraine, 2023.
No, I am not looking for the shot, the explosion, the corpse, the child in tears saying goodbye to their parents leaving for the front… And yet I am in the war. And yet, these things must be documented.
But who better than the witness of the event to do so—at their window, with a trembling hand, in their car as they try to escape what they see, what they are living through. This witness, equipped with a smartphone, will produce images—sometimes to keep a record, sometimes as if to shield themselves from what is before them, or simply by chance.
Images shared on social networks, as if offered to the world. Sometimes reframed by others and turned into memes (memes that seem to be to photograph what caricature is to drawing), these images go viral, reaching an audience far exceeding that of the press. Yet image professionals must exist more than ever—to verify authenticity, to identify, to research, to investigate—and journalists must attempt, among other things, to collect the accounts of events documented by these witnesses.
The war in Ukraine is a good example: a war where, despite the very large number of photojournalists on the ground, the most powerful, most iconic images—often the only ones documenting an event—remain those made by these witnesses in areas where photographers are not. In those zones that have become inaccessible; from Azovstal to Kherson (when the city was in Russian hands), from occupied areas to the front line. Only a few civilians and combatants remain—witnesses and sometimes also actors in the event.
Among these images, those produced by combatants in particular raise numerous questions. Whether captured with body-worn cameras and presented as edits put together by soldiers during the lulls that punctuate war—reminding us, in a new form, of “trench art”—or produced by means of FPV drones, which in turn become not merely documents but truly instruments of killing: images one might call “performative,” drawing a parallel with the concept developed by the British philosopher J. L. Austin regarding language.
The importance of these amateur images does not mean that professional imagery in war should no longer exist, but perhaps that it should exist differently—less in the pursuit of the event itself, and rather through an approach that could be called post-documentary, questioning the place of the medium, local iconography, the history of the image, all with a more conceptual reflection—perhaps placing the gaze or voice of the event’s protagonist at the heart of the process.
Just as the invention of photographic film and halftone printing revolutionized the war image between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one can say that for several years now a new revolution has been underway with the advent of digital technology and the internet, followed by the smartphone, the body-mounted camera, and finally the FPV drone—inviting us to rethink the war image, its status, and the place of those who produce it.
Here is the project From far away, I hear the Cossacks’ reply, carried out in Ukraine in September 2023 with the 112th Brigade of the Ukrainian army. This photograph is the fruit of this reflection on the place of the image professional in war—and a possible answer.
February 24, 2022: the beginning of the full-scale invasion.
Roman Gribov, whom you can see at the center of this photograph, one of the 13 Ukrainian soldiers on Snake Island, responds to the Russian flagship ordering them to surrender:
“Russian warship, go fuck yourself!”
On February 25, the recording of the exchange was made public and looped in the media around the world. I immediately thought of the reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Ottoman Sultan ordering them to submit, immortalized by Ilya Repin—a reproduction of which, given to me during the Maidan Revolution, has been on my fridge door as a magnet since 2014.
This painting, so important in the Ukrainian national narrative, is nevertheless in the collections of the Russian Museum in St Petersburg. In 2021, when the canvas was shown in Paris for the Ilya Repin retrospective at the Petit Palais, the exhibition was titled Painting the Russian Soul, forgetting that Repin was born and raised near Kharkiv in present-day Ukraine and that he exalted in his paintings the Ukrainian identity that was so dear to him.
This appropriation of Ukrainian history by Russia is essential to grasp. As evidence, consider the 25-page text written in July 2021 by Vladimir Putin, claiming that Ukraine is merely the product of an artificial Soviet creation and that its history is in fact that of Russia—a text he would use a few months later to justify his invasion.
This colonial vision stemming from Russian imperialism appears as early as the 18th century when, in order to compete with the great European courts, Muscovy—become the Russian Empire—appropriated the very ancient history that belongs to Ukraine.
Systematic looting of museums, destruction of school textbooks and of any works recounting Ukrainian history and culture, arrest of teachers refusing to implement the official Russian curriculum—this is the reality in the occupied territories. In March 2022, Olga Lioubinova, Russia’s Minister of Culture, declared: “Everything related to the development of the cultural sector in the new constituent entities of the Russian Federation and to their integration is an absolute priority for us. (…) From the very first days of the special military operation, representatives of our museums have been working in the new territories.”
While the war aimed at conquering Ukrainian territory is visible to all and its condemnation relatively consensual in Europe, the far more insidious war being waged over control of history and culture remains little known—and many Europeans often unwittingly participate in the spread of this Russian colonial construct.
This photograph—now one of the iconic images of this conflict, disseminated worldwide and embraced by Ukrainian popular culture, notably through numerous derivative objects—shows how, through a post-documentary approach, the professional image-maker can continue to exist and offer a perspective on the conflict that an amateur could not. We see here the importance this image has taken, as a partisan, taking very great risks, uses it as a symbol of resistance in this Russian Museum in St Petersburg, at the heart of Putin’s Russia.
Culture is a weapon on a vast battlefield; let us not forget it.
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