In a series titled ‘Faces of War’ (2022-23), you might expect to see the hardened stares of battle-ready soldiers in front of the camera, but here are the faces of everyday people. Citizens of different ages and walks of life. These are the witnesses, the displaced, the victims and the heroes during a time of invasion and war.
In photographing these subjects, Chekmenev has considered the formal aspects of traditional portraiture in photography or painting. Faces are carefully lit and emerge from the shadows of the dark or dimly lit spaces. The backgrounds reveal signs of the character of the environments that the people occupy: blacked-out doors and windows, sandbags and artificial lighting suggest places of safety and shelter. The subjects sit for their portraits with varying postures and gazes that convey strength and defiance but Chekmenev has also recorded moments of contemplation and reflection.
They clutch belongings: warm clothing, jars of preserves, a rifle, feed for a goat. Chekmenev understands the importance of these people’s stories and his opportunity to tell them. This is apparent in his earlier projects too: ‘Citizens of Kyiv’ (2022), is a chronicling of life in the capital city of Ukraine following the Russian invasion in 2022; ‘Deleted’ (2018-20), presents portraits of some of the 1000s of homeless inhabitants of the city of Kyiv, many of whom had lost everything since the start of the war in Eastern Ukraine and rely on the help of NGOs and charities; and ‘Odesa People’ (1999-2019), consists of black and white documentary photographs of people in the streets and other public places in post-Soviet Odessa, made over a 20 year period. These projects are not photojournalism.
They differ greatly from some of the ‘fly-in, fly-out’ pictures from Ukraine offered by the international media. Since the early 1990s, Chekmenev has been making personal work about the everyday, photographing from within Ukrainian communities with an acute understanding of the importance of recording the history of his country and its people.
It is a sad trait of people to realize the value of only when they lose it. Therefore, the value of one’s home becomes tangible for many only through its loss or the threat of losing it. If we believe the German poet and philosopher Novalis that philosophy is homesickness, then at thе moment of the threat of losing one’s own home, the deep foundations of one’s existence are revealed.
This traumatic experience was and is being experienced by many citizens of Ukraine due to Russian aggression against our country. Some lost their home in a terrible literal sense because the Russians destroyed it, and some had to flee their home to other regions of our country or even to other countries, saving their lives and the lives of their children and parents from Russian murders. However, even those who remained do not feel at home because the home is threatened, because at any moment it can be destroyed by Russian missiles even at a great distance from the front line, not to mention the front-line cities and villages, which Russians are trying to destroy with all the weapons they have.
Home is where it is comfortable. Home is the shelter of life. However, today, the whole of Ukraine is threatened by the Russian world of death. The Russians came to kill us, so even in our own home, we do not feel protected and safe from Russian evil.
However, our home is not just a territory; our home is our way of life. This is what the ancient Greek word ‘ethos’ expresses, from which the concept ‘ethics’ comes. Therefore, homesickness is not so much a longing for a place in space as a longing for normal life, for the values on which it is based. In the routine course of daily existence, we hardly notice them, and only political crises and historical catastrophes bring them to light.
A clear majority of citizens of Ukraine realized the values of freedom and dignity only when Yanukovych’s gang, and the Kremlin puppeteers of this gang led by Putin, tried to deprive us of these values. We came out to Maidan (Independence Square in Kyiv) in 2013-14 to protect them. It is not by chance that we called this event the Revolution of Dignity, and its main slogan was the statement: ‘Freedom is our religion’. For Russians, the values of freedom and dignity are not just incomprehensible, they are hostile to their way of life, they are aliens in their terrible ‘dead house’. In the Russian state, there is always a gang of vicious criminals ruling over a mass of oppressed slaves. Therefore, it does not matter who is at the head of this darkness – the tsar, the general secretary of the Communist Party, which has more power than the tsar does, or the president who dreams of becoming a tsar. The vicious circle closes up. Therefore, Russia is, in the end, not a home for people where one can be happy, but a terrible place for the horrible stranger who entered our human world. Russians are destitute and unhappy, and at the same time, they enjoy the feeling of their own degradation, which permeates the so-called Russian culture. They are a threat to whole humanity and, therefore, to themselves. They hate any home because their own home is unbearable for them. And from this, Russian necrophilia is born, the Russian cult of death, the thirst to destroy. Russian homelessness is precisely what gives rise to the hate of home as such.
But in the end, the home of humanity is the our planet. Love for one’s home, for one’s planet, and love for life is an ineradicable feeling of the truly human experience. Instead, Russian barbarians are not only committing genocide against the people of Ukraine today, but they are also committing ecocide, killing nature. The cruelty of the Russian invaders to animals, incomprehensible to civilized people, horrifies us, but it fits into the general necrophilic plan of the Russian invasion — if we do not want to be like them, then they destroy not only us but also our land, from which our way of being grows. The existence of free people with dignity is unbearable for them, so the logic of the Russians is too simple: if you are not destined to be happy, then you must destroy the possibility of happiness for everyone else. It is sweet to be miserable together, it is unbearable and humiliating to be miserable alone. This is how Russian masochism gives rise to Russian sadism. After all, this is a very infantile consciousness. A child who did not receive the desired toy does not just want to take this toy away from another child but wants this toy not to be there at all. Homeless Russians do not long for a home but want to deprive everyone else of a home. They want to deprive us of our home. They threaten to destroy our planet in a nuclear apocalypse. The Russian cannibals cry: ‘We don’t need a world without Russia!’ However, do they treat Russia itself as their own home? If this were really so, then they would have set in order their own country instead of forcefully imposing their own perverted way of life on their neighbors.
The text has been written on the occasion of HOME programme organized by Open Eye Gallery and Ukrainian. Photographies that took place in Liverpool in May 2023. The programme has been commissioned by Culture Liverpool / Liverpool City Council for EuroFestival. Funded by DCMS, The British Council, Spirit of 2012, Arts Council England. Supported by Ukrainian Institute, Liverpool ONE, Liverpool BID.
Contributing to the end of Soviet rule and Ukrainian independence, the miners’ strikes starting in the late eighties became a fundamental part of Ukrainian history, even if this was not the intention. Between 1989 and 1998, strikes in the mining region of Donbas in eastern Ukraine became a yearly ritual during which the workers protested the non-payment of wages, and demanded safer working conditions, higher wages and housing subsidies for their families. The first strike of July 1989 started in the Kuzbas mines of southern Russia working its way towards the Ukrainian Donbas region culminating in over half a million workers on strike, forming the first national-level miners’ strike. The movement was fuelled by distrust and dissatisfaction with the Soviet government, at a time when the industry relied heavily on government subsidies. Following independence on August 24th, 1991 came a wave of privatisation in Ukraine, causing a large rift in the working conditions in the private and state-owned mines. In May 1998, the strikers decided to march on Kyiv with 1,000 men walking the 600 km journey, which took over three weeks to accomplish and resulted in the government agreeing to pay their unpaid wages of nine months; the strikers returned via train and were back at work a few days after.
Documentary photographer and storyteller Valeriy Miloserdov (b. 1961) recounts the fall of the once lucrative and well-reputed work of the miner in the industry’s initial days in the 1950s to a workforce left in the shadows in the early nineties and first years of the country’s independence. The black and white photographic series titled Abandoned People enters into the pits, protests and private home life of the mine workers from the years 1994 to 1999. Miloserdov, who worked as a photojournalist for a newspaper at the time of this series, captured and covered critical moments in political history such as in Vilnius and the Soviet Coup of 1991, the demolition of the Lenin statue in Lviv, the Crimean Tatar rally in Simferopol, amongst other key events. Initially motivated to witness the Donbas region in the years following the Soviet collapse, the visit evolved into a five-year project, gaining the trust of the workers and their families. This series demonstrates intimacy, whereas in other works there remains a distance between the photographer and the subject. The miners are captured as both a collective and as individuals, demonstrating physical and determined strength, yet at the same time a human vulnerability: people with crutches, wives kneeling on the floor in tears, and the preparation of coffins. The downfall of the mining industry by the early 1990s had an effect on all, the coal mines were the focal point of the communities; without the mines, there was no livelihood and no money.
In addition to the images of heavy labour, Miloserdov captures the surrounding moments in the mining community’s day-to-day life. From a day trip to the beach with the children to the participation in religious ceremonies to a cup of tea in the home, we are given 360-degree access to the lives of these people. There are also images of priests, funeral processions and men ill in bed, which are references to the short life expectancy of these workers and the occupational diseases that slowly began to emerge over the years; a safer workplace, equipment and guarantee of housing for their families were protagonists of the protests.
Mining has been an oft-depicted subject starting in the industrial revolution by anonymous photographers of the 1880s, George Bretz, or the adaptly named John Charles Burrow, an English photographer who was commissioned to document the work in four of Cornwall’s deepest mines, resulting in creating an archive of man’s capability and awe of technology. The industry’s destructive and transformative impact on the earth is depicted in the photographs of the Anthropocene project by Edward Burtynsky, and Josef Koudelka’s The Black Triangle.
Along with the technology and the landscape, mining photography more often than not delves into the people. From Lewis Hine’s documentation of child labour in America in the early 20th century to several projects by Sebastião Salgado, who denounces the working conditions of mines and oil fields. Three Generations of Welsh Miners (1950) by W. Eugene Smith shows the importance of a mine in one family in a country where mining became the topic of heated discussion, protests, strikes and later forced closures by the Thatcher government. In 2011, Song Chao presented the work Miners; a series of portraits of Chinese workers photographed as they finish their shift against a white background, highlighting their personalities and their similarities. Pierre Gonnord presented a similar work of portraits concentrating on the last miners of a dying industry in present-day Spain.
A particular shot by Miloserdov, taken in July 1995 at the Partyzanska mine in the city of Antratsyt, Luhansk Oblast, consists of a miner in the showers washing the coal soot off his face and body, Miloserdov aimed to capture the moment in which the outer shell comes off, and the man re-appears. This image, captured in a private moment, recalls the work of Arsen Savadov (b. 1962), where he photographs miners post-shift in the showers with an almost theatrical feel. Photographs selfdefined as a Dadaist practice, Savadov’s soot-covered miners dressed in ballet tutus play with the pre-conceived notions of class definition and the ability to overlap the two sides of the spectrum. The series Donbas Chocolate (1997), taken from the Deepinsider project, brings together high culture and manual labour to create a collage-esque portrait of clashing stereotypes and their relevance to political propaganda in the late-nineties. Almost in continuation of Miloserdov’s project, Dreamland Donbas (2002-2003) by Viktor Marushchenko delves into the lives of those who continue to look and dig for hope within the abandoned mines located in the cities and towns of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions. As the years have passed, mining on an industrial level has become cost inefficient and therefore the structures have been forced to close down, regardless of the communities which have grown in the vicinity. Marushchenko photographs individual figures who are dwarfed by the industrial landscapes that have morphed and consumed the land around them.
Although Oleksandr Glyadyelov’s photographic practice covers a vast span of topics this text will focus on photographs taken by Glyadelov in eastern Ukraine, where the war has been ongoing since 2014 and his documentation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that started on the 24th of February, 2022. Today, the photographs taken in 2014-2020, narrate historical events that seem to have inevitably moved away from us in time and space. Now the geography of hostilities has changed, as they are taking place all over Ukraine, and their intensity morphed from peaks of activity during the eight years of relative peace to the almost round-the-clock bombing. However, the essence has not changed: war always brings suffering, ruin, and pain – capitalized truths, (un)learned history lessons.
Ukraine is now at the epicentre of the war. Not of their own volition, not because of their geopolitical ambitions. The country and the people who live in it are defending their right to self-determination, freedom, the right to their history, which will not be rewritten to fit the grand imperial narrative, and their land. The goal is worthy, but what is the daily price to pay to achieve it?
Oleksandr Glyadelov is a photographer who was wounded in 2014 while shooting near Ilovaisk during one of the bloodiest battles of eastern Ukraine. His immense archive of photographs is difficult, scary, and impossible not to look at. He puts war in another dimension: abstract, immeasurable, and cruel in its indifference to human destinies. The horrors do not disappear; however, through everyday life, the soldiers’ facial expressions, moments of rest, or maximum tension engraved on film, something deeply human appears – vulnerability, courage, dignity, and victory.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine continues Oleksandr works without a break covering the wartime events in the city of Kyiv, and the wider Kyiv and Chernihiv regions. With his analogue camera he goes to small towns, the names of which are on everyone’s lips due to the unjustified atrocities and looting carried out by Russian troops. Among these are Bucha, Irpyn’, Borodyanka: towns which were recently cleared of the Russian army. All it left behind is debris, suffering and death.
The ongoing series deals with the presentation of highly charged content and documents the state of affairs in Ukraine with the sensibility of an analogue camera that takes no chances. Glyadelov claims that there is no distance between himself and the photographed subject, which makes his task close to impossible as he often observes matters of life and death, the implausible ferocity of the Russian troops towards civilians and the scorched earth they leave behind. Despite the horrors witnessed in Moldova, Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Kyrgyzstan, Somalia, South Sudan, where the photographer covered wars and armed conflicts, through his photographic practice he manifests love for humanity and belief in its capacity to fight for a better future.
Oleksandr Glyadelov prefers not to call himself a war photographer, although he has repeatedly photographed in war zones, and I think I understand why – it would be better if such professions no longer existed.
This text was written on the occasion of the publication Oleksandr Glyadelov, War (2014-2022) released by 89books. It’s an ongoing series of separate volumes, which will be concluded with the end of the war.
