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.
War means disruption. The forced displacement of people. In this series Igor Chekachkov documents the daily lives of people who have been forced to leave their homes due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now sharing a living space with host families and other displaced Ukrainians, they have lost the privacy of home.
These images are intimate. They show us what normality looks like during monumental upheaval. We see mealtimes, fractured rest and boredom. The mundane parts of everyday life, adapted out of necessity to a new environment. But while Chekachkov’s camera brings us into the room, we are never invited to participate. We take on the role of a slightly awkward observer, hovering somewhere between awareness and involvement.
This reflects how many Europeans feel about the invasion of Ukraine. We watch horrified from the sidelines, acutely aware of its significance but disconnected from the reality of war. The scale of the destruction, death and upheaval is hard to comprehend. Chekachkov’s photographs help bridge the gap between news headlines and our personal capacity for compassion and care. They share a glimpse into daily life that makes war real.
We need photographers to show us the human impact of war – to keep reminding us to stay engaged while our own daily lives continue. We can show our support by making sure these images are seen and remembered.
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.
Artem Humilevskiy is a neophyte of photography. He started to photograph quite recently, in 2019, and the first attempts to master this medium were of a commercial nature. He got involved in photography as an art that fits into the system of contemporary art after a blitz study at MYPH photography school in Mykolaiv and meeting its leader and teacher Sergey Melnitchenko. Melnitchenko’s projects (‘Schwarzenegger – my idol’, ‘Young and free?’) were dealing, among other things, with the problem of corporeality. It was an irony of masculine athleticism in the first case and a special photo session of some sort of a men’s club in the natural environment in the latter. But in both cases, these were not the exercises in the search for body plasticity in the traditional nude photography genre.
In Humilevskiy’s first project after this school, The Giant, the question of the body also takes a prominent place. It is the core of the curatorial concept and text. In The Giant, too, it is not just a fixation on ordinary male nudity but an extreme body that fits into different types of spaces: closed and open, interior and landscape. The closeness of the first images in the project was due to the Covid restrictions. Disconnection, the collapse of established communication links, isolation and loneliness — all this became a motivating reason to pick up a camera and plunge into self-reflection in these forcibly abnormal and harsh conditions. As the regime loosened, the photographer’s lens naturally opened the spatial horizons of studying his non-trivial body. As a result, all this turned into a kind of adventure, a journey of the body; of the Great Body. The author was able to turn the mise-en-scène narrative into the mythological realm; into the story about the life of some fabled giants.
If you try to define the project’s genre, it will be difficult to do so because of its hybridity and blur. In essence, this is a self-portrait (mainly full or half-length portraits), but in an environment, including a landscape. The unique quality of the project is its everydayness. Due to this diffuseness, the study of the inner world acquires equal importance with the visual outline and construct of the outer world. The fusion, not the opposition, of these worlds, gives The Giant harmonious naturalness, integrity, and imaginative appeal.
In his interview with the Kyiv-based Bird in Flight media, Humilevskiy emphasised the key point: ‘In the photographs, I am always naked, because for me the body is always about sincerity and openness, and I want to be as honest as possible with the viewer.’ Attitudes towards the naked body, say, in ancient times (there is even such a concept among art historians – ‘heroic nudity of a mature man’), or in our era of total and flattering selfies, Instagram exhibitionism, unrestrained demonstration of fitness beauty, TV shows like ‘I’m ashamed of my body’, ‘Weighed and happy’, of course, are very different. Today it is difficult to surprise someone, to stun someone in this bodily flow. And our author is saved because he does not strive for this but tries, as follows from the quote above, to be sincere and honest. This somewhat ‘Rabelaisian’ approach gives rise to self-irony and a state of ‘unarmed nakedness’, as the German journalist Peter-Matthias Gaede aptly called it, which can attract the attention of the viewer and evoke their increased interest due to, rather paradoxically, its simplicity, unpretentiousness and organicity. At the same time, it does so without the help of accompanying bodily sexuality. In Humilevskiy’s project, it is absent; the question of the body is exhausted by the body as such. An experienced viewer is more likely to have connotations from the history of art, including the modern one, where the line of the hyperbolised body form is prominently revealed: the Flemish Rubens and Jordaens, the Colombian Botero, the British Lucien Freud, and the Ukrainian Lesya Khomenko, with her picturesque cycle ‘Giants’.
In Humilevsky’s Giant, the large form prevails. The figures seem to be sculptural, pointedly voluminous. Their relief is implanted, as it were, in the 2D picture, inside it. In the series, which includes more than a hundred subjects, different approaches to shooting on location are apparent. There are casual, even spontaneous ones and more structured, theatrically excessive ones. The colour scheme also differs: from a more restrained one, based on tighter colour combinations, to a brighter and more colourful one. In the project, despite the complete presence of a monohero, there is no monotony also because it unexpectedly combines comedy and sadness, naivety and seriousness, logical justification and absurdity.
Another distinctive feature of the project is its keenly felt involvement in the events in Ukraine; the spirit of the times is very insightfully conveyed. And it’s not even about direct patriotism, when, let’s say, the national flag colours are used in several photographs, but about the suspense, anxious anticipation, and foreboding that literally permeates the mood of the series. The fact that the author finished his project as soon as a full-scale invasion began is quite natural. The war has strongly influenced the further life of the project, inevitably changing and adding new intonations to its current perception.
Images – courtesy of the artist
The article has been written by Oleksandr Soloviov on the occasion of an online exhibition, ‘The Giant’ at BAROQUE Gallery, accessible from phones and tablets at the link
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.
I love the expressions in these portraits. The slightly cheeky, innocent girl with pleading eyes. The doleful enigmatic expression of the teenager, possibly sulky, possibly scared. Then the defiant, challenging young woman. The following images in the series hint at context; the collections of Spice Girls and Harry Potter memorabilia could belong to any millennial young woman in the West.
The young woman wears a shirt emblazoned with the words ‘attraction’ and ‘seduction’. She is surrounded by the detritus of adult life – what looks like passport photos, identity cards, possibly a payslip or official document, as well as sunglasses, a hat and novelty tights. Alongside the photography equipment and photographs, is a transparent shirt and a ‘slinky’. For me, this image captures that moment when a young woman emerges as an adult with her own clear identity and character. She is saying, ‘this is who I am’.
These photographs are autobiographical – the items from popular culture are the artist’s own childhood treasures, with models posing as her younger self. In many ways, the images of childhood and adolescence are universal, at least in Western culture, but seen through the lens of the war in Ukraine, they become far more poignant. Is it possible to maintain the innocence and naivety of childhood when your home has been invaded? What happens to the hearts and minds of the children and young people who grow up in such circumstances? How do you hold on to your heritage when your country is fighting for its independence? Polina Polikarpova’s series Childhood Ballad is a glimpse into the childhood of one person, yet at the same time, the significant questions it raises are inherent across the nation.
