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.
Images courtesy of Alexander Chekmenev