In 2011, Yaroslav Solop went on holiday with a group of friends to the coast of the Crimean Peninsula near Sevastopol. ‘My friends and I spent hours in deserted places,’ he recalls, ‘exploring the sky and rocks, quoting Homer’s Odyssey, picking small pebbles with our hands, sniffing salt air, watching the Black Sea’. Solop took a series of analogue photographs during the trip, which he left undeveloped after returning home to Kyiv.
Three years later, in early 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. The dormant images in the rolls of film he had put to one side took on a new significance. They contained glimpses of an irretrievable past and an inaccessible place. It was only then that Solop felt moved to do something with the exposures. The developing chemicals brought these images into view – arcadian visions of waves lapping the shores of the Black Sea, the sun setting over the remains of the ancient Greek colony of Khersones, and sailboats moored in the harbour at Sevastopol. Before printing the negatives, Solop dragged a small paintbrush over them, creating delicate golden lines which snake across the final pictures.
The title of the series, Eternal Return, demands that we question this conventional view of photographic time. It suggests that the images represent a moment which is not only in the past but will recur.
At first glance, the resulting work is a remarkably escapist response to Russian aggression, especially considering photography’s ability to rapidly document live events. It is a turning away from the troubled present, a nostalgic gesture which suggests an unwillingness or inability to confront reality. Its warm-and-fuzzy evocation of a tranquil holiday seems out of place alongside the constant flow of news images showing violence and destruction in Crimea since 2014. The grainy analogue film heightens the contrast with the cold facts on our flickering screens.
Solop’s description of the holiday, combining references to classical culture with celebrations of carefree exploration and the natural world, recalls Evgeniy Pavlov’s Violin (1972), a landmark series in Ukrainian photography. Pavlov depicted a group of young hippies exploring a lakeside idyll near Kharkiv, nude except for a sole prop, the eponymous violin. The group’s aimlessness, erotic license, and connection with nature represented a rebellious rejection of the industry, productivity, and social conformity emphasised in Soviet media and society. Solop’s Eternal Return uses similar tropes but reframes them in the past tense. In the 70s, Pavlov celebrated what life might hold beyond communist rule – a future of freedom and reconnection. Forty years later, Solop’s work mourns the loss of these same things, presenting a rose-tinted vision of life before Russia returned.
In this respect, the series utilises what Roland Barthes, in his morbid late writing, considers the central characteristic of photography. Looking at a photo of his recently deceased mother, Barthes writes that the medium is defined by its ‘pastness’, its depiction of ‘what-has-been’. Our awareness of the presence of the subject before the camera at the moment the photo was taken slips inevitably into an awareness of the pastness of that instant. The presence of the photo implies the absence of its subject. ‘Whether or not the subject is already dead,’ according to Barthes, ‘every photograph is this catastrophe’.(1) Eternal Return’s focus on a then free, then beautiful land, now annexed, now war torn, generates its poignancy by accentuating this photographic pastness. It movingly evokes a sense of loss that has become all too familiar to Ukrainians in recent months. Captured in the moments after the sun dips below the horizon, the images anticipate the words of Kateryna Iakovlenko from March this year. Before Russia’s invasion, she laments, ‘my social media feed was full of sunrises, sunsets, and landscapes. On February 24, the beauty of the sunrise was stolen from us. (2)
The title of the series, Eternal Return, demands that we question this conventional view of photographic time. It suggests that the images represent a moment which is not only in the past but will recur. Solop’s extended process demonstrates that repetition into the future is as much a characteristic of photography as pastness. The three-year period between exposure and printing stresses that the two acts are separate. This calls attention to two connected features of analogue photographic production: (1) that the creation of a photograph does not exclusively occur at the moment of exposure but also during its printing, which is itself a creative process and (2) that photographs can be reproduced again and again – in a timeframe divorced from the exposure. The hyphenated technique (expose-develop-print) means that temporal multiplicity rather than singularity defines the medium. Each image can disperse across time and space in limitless reproductions, enacting its own eternal return. So rather than dwelling on the pastness of the scenes represented, we begin to think of this forward movement. Photography becomes a tool for preserving a moment from the past for the future. Pools of developing liquid reproduce the image, flowing ceaselessly back and forth like the waves in Solop’s series. The act of printing becomes a statement of defiance not mourning: this was Ukraine, is Ukraine now, and will be Ukraine again. The photograph’s recalcitrance becomes a symbol of persistence and hope.
Obviously, this change of tense does not reverse Russia’s annexation of Crimea or invasion of Ukraine, but it does encourage a different kind of thinking. In The Miracle of Analogy, Kaja Silverman points out the need to reconceptualise photographic temporality. The future perfect tense pervades Barthes’ account of the medium. The unifying trait of all photographed subjects in his view is that they are ‘going to die’: ‘the photograph tells me death in the future’. He understands the photograph as first-and-foremost a confirmation of loss which, Silverman observes, fixes this loss as an unalterable, even natural truth. If this death-to-come is inevitable, change becomes impossible and action futile. This predominant way of looking at photographs ‘renders the future as unchanging as the past’ and so ‘expresses and contributes to the political despair that afflicts so many of us today: our sense that the future is “all used up”’.
Searching for alternatives to Barthes’ approach, Silverman invokes Walter Benjamin’s belief that with photographs the past addresses the present. For Benjamin, early photographs hold ‘a disclosive rather than an evidentiary truth’. They do not offer a fixed record of the past but enter an ongoing dialogue with the present. They contain, he suggests, a message destined for a future viewer. The photograph is ‘propelled by a mysterious kind of intentionality toward a particular look – one that has the capacity to recognise it’. ‘It travels through time and space to reach this look, and when it arrives, … the past is realised within the present’. Reflecting on this in The Arcades Project, Benjamin quotes André Monglond: ‘The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive page. The future alone possesses developers strong enough to reveal the image in all its details. (3)
While Solop exposed the negatives in Crimea in 2011, only in 2014 did he comprehend the historical significance of what they contain. Only then, in Monglond’s words, did he possess the developers strong enough. He suddenly lived, it seemed, in the moment to which the images call out. Rather than mourning the absent past, we look at these photos as guides to a possible future.
What sort of future, then, might the photographs help us imagine? In their presentation of an image of Ukraine without Russia, in spite of Russia’s invasion, they are an eloquent expression of the decolonial attitude of many contemporary Ukrainians: the desire not only to escape the Kremlin’s control but also to move beyond the postcolonial relationship so that Ukraine is no longer defined by its association with Russia.
As Svitlana Biedarieva observes, Putin’s Russia is obsessed with Ukraine, whose territory has become an object of national desire. Solop’s title can be read as an exasperated sigh at Russia’s repetitive reappearance in Ukraine throughout history. ‘Among Ukrainians,’ by contrast, ‘there is more than a general lack of interest in Russia and its territory; indeed, there is a conscious collective position of distancing to avoid entanglement. (4) Solop gives this attitude pictorial form. Recording the combat could risk legitimising it as a mutually desired war between two states rather than an unprovoked invasion. And similarly, representing Russian forces would allow them to do on the level of the picture plane what they have done in reality – namely, to penetrate and tarnish Ukrainian space. His work manages to create an image which is about the war but excludes Russia and the conflict itself. In this simple way, it proclaims the rightful independence of this landscape from its colonial occupier and pictures a decolonial future.
Reluctance to represent conflict explicitly is a feature of much Ukrainian art photography. SashaKurmaz’s 12 Months, for example, presents 12 colour photographs of ordinary scenes from Kyiv, one for every month of 2017. The pictures are then obscured by almost completely black images, each representing the loss of a Ukrainian soldier during that month. Russian violence in this case causes a concealment of the image. As in Solop’s series, the invasion is felt as an absence – and as an interruption of Ukrainian normality. ElenaSubach is in the same category, photographing empty chairs left by Ukrainians who fled their homes to escape Russian attacks earlier this year. Again, these are decolonial war photographs, providing photographic evidence not of the two-sided combat but of Ukraine’s longing to be left alone. This is the visual equivalent of the nation’s military policy to fight only within its borders. In this light, the escapism of Eternal Return should not be viewed as nostalgic but as evidence of radical uninterest in the imperial oppressor, an index of Solop’s longing for true freedom. (5)
The paint strokes epitomise this position. In much countercultural Soviet photography, overpainting was a rebellious, anti-Kremlin act – a rejection of the instrumental realism of communist photography.
The paint strokes epitomise this position. In much countercultural Soviet photography, overpainting was a rebellious, anti-Kremlin act – a rejection of the instrumental realism of communist photography. Such practices aligned themselves with the bravura mark-making of New York action painting, which within the context of the Cold War was viewed as an artistic argument in favour of American neo-liberalism. But Solop’s marks have none of the confidence of Franz Kline or Jackson Pollock, or the liberated joy of Kharkiv School photographers such as Pavlov and Boris Mikhailov. They do not dash but dawdle. They do not engage in the East-West dichotomy – totalitarian conformity vs liberal expression – and so resist the urge to be associated with Russia altogether, even negatively.
Anti-Soviet overpainting often conceals large parts of a photograph to replace indexical realism with artful expression. Solop’s brushstrokes, meanwhile, frame or underline the photographic content; thin and translucent, they meander above and below the crucial areas of each picture. Like a tick on a register, they seem only to confirm the artist’s presence as he first observed the images appear, in that moment Benjamin imagines when past and present communicate. With their shimmering glow, they lead us into the spaces of the photographs. If we follow them, we can delight in these moments on the shore, at the margins, play among the ruins of empire and imagine a world free from its shackles. Bask in the fading light in the knowledge that the sun, ‘stolen from us’, will be back.
1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 96.
2. Kateryna Iakovlenko, ‘Landscape, Decolonial and Ukrainian Resistance’, Blok Magazine (28 March 2022), https://blokmagazine.com/landscape-decolonial-and-ukrainian-resistance/.
3. The central section of this article draws extensively from Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy, or The History of Photography, Part 1 (Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 1-9.
4. Svitlana Biedarieva, ‘Decolonization and Disentanglement in Ukrainian Art’, Post: Notes on Art in a Global Context (2 June 2022), https://post.moma.org/decolonization-and-disentanglement-in-ukrainian-art/.
5. Kateryna Iakovlenko articulates this uninterest in a recent interview: ‘Of course, like many Ukrainians, I feel rage and disappointment towards the aggressor. But most importantly, I feel indifferent to him. For me, it is only necessary that there are no Russian soldiers on the territory of my country… I don’t want to think about the aggressor; I like to think about the future’. See ‘Conversations: Life After Ruins’, art-agenda (29 September 2022).
