Article published in the Royal Photographic Society Journal, March 2024, print only.
For the last two years images from Ukraine have flooded our news stands and our screens. Always images of horror: refugees fleeing in the snow, bodies sprawled next to their suitcases, soldiers on the operating table and in the trenches.
The picture they paint is unremittingly bleak. And rightly so: war is hell, and the suffering unleashed on the people of Ukraine by Russia is incomprehensible in scale and savagery. But the picture is painted mostly by outsiders, who can come and go.
For most Ukrainian photographers, this isn’t an option. Whether photojournalists or visual artists, they try to document what is happening around them – and what is happening to them: the sudden implosion of their peaceful lives, the grief and fear that forms a backdrop to everyday life. Which, naturally, carries on – but in a strange and warped form.
In ‘War Diary’, a series of images shortlisted for the Prix Pictet 2023, Gera Artemova has somehow managed to convey what I struggle to with words: the uncanny juxtaposition of the everyday with horror and confusion of war waged against civilians. Among her black-and-white images are scenes sadly familiar: smoke rising over the city after an air raid; barbed wire tangled around an anti-tank obstacle. But the photo of the city was taken from Artemova’s own flat, in a high-rise in Kyiv’s left bank district. This is the family’s home. And this – black smoke billowing in the near distance – is their ‘normal’.
The image is part of a diptych; the second shows clouds of steam from a pot on the stove catching the light from the kitchen window, in a quiet country cottage. It is so domestic, so peaceful. And yet what it shows is also not ‘normal’ – Artemova and her family fled to this village house for safety on the second day of the invasion, returning to Kyiv in the summer. But nowhere is really safe in Ukraine.
“There is no normal life inside the war,” Artemova says quietly, speaking to me from her Kyiv flat in early 2024, two weeks after the most deadly aerial attacks since 2022. “We’re not normal. We just try to deal with it.”
‘War Diary’ is, in part, a record. Artemova knew “in one second” that the full-scale invasion had started when explosions woke her early on 24th February 2022. She wanted to capture what was happening. But when you rush to the bomb shelter with your sleepy young son in your arms, the priority is grabbing medicine and food – not cameras. So she shot every picture in the series with an iPhone.
“In that situation, it was actually the most appropriate and honest medium,” she reflects. “A lot of the pictures just wouldn’t have happened if I’d approached it like a photographer – you know, getting the camera, setting up… But in that moment, you don’t have anything else to hand.”
The images are quiet and thoughtful – much like Artemova herself. They are also dark, troubling and painful. In photos from Vyhraiv, the village where she spent that terrible spring, the bucolic everyday takes on such disturbing meaning: the black spreading branches of a huge oak tree, and alongside, tree limbs on the ground, chopped and dumped in a pile. The gardening gloves lie among them, disembodied.
“We look at everyday things, but we see something else,” Artemova explains. It was April 2022 when she piled up the branches – gathering firewood for the stove. All anyone could think about then were the atrocities just revealed in Bucha, a town near Kyiv. When Ukrainian soldiers drove the Russians out, they found the bodies of civilians littering the streets. It was almost incomprehensible: mass graves, corpses with bound hands, the torture cells. The sheer evil of it.
Another diptych has the famous bas-relief of St George slaying the dragon, the line of his spear echoed alongside in an image of a shovel stuck in the ground. I thought, immediately, of Izium’s awful mass graves, uncovered in late 2022; Artemova says she thought again of Bucha. What was done there, she says, is “forever etched in the memory and consciousness of every Ukrainian. The horror of what was discovered was so great it was hard to breathe.”
And so, in April 2022, it was all she could see. In such circumstances, you cannot even dig the good earth, plant seeds hopefully in spring, without the flickering knowledge of atrocities.
St George’s dragon, of course, represents evil, and it’s no coincidence that this particular bas-relief was once part of the magnificent twelfth-century cathedral in Kyiv, St Michael’s, which was destroyed by the Soviet authorities in the 1930s. The crimes committed by Russian rulers in Ukraine – Tsarist and Soviet – are now, thanks in part to the war, really being reckoned with. In fact Artemova’s previous work has involved pulling apart the Soviet narratives she grew up with, exposing the big lies on which this history was built.
In fact it was history that spurred Artemova on to keep this extraordinary visual diary. She realised that though her two great-grandmothers had lived through the second world war, she knew nothing of their inner thoughts and everyday life then.
“There’s nothing about how they coped, what they were thinking. There’s just a few short facts.”
One great-grandmother had children roughly the same age as Artemova’s when the war broke out. She would have gone through the same exhausting worry – trying to protect a child in an utterly unpredictable and terrifying situation.
Artemova’s son appears often in the full series of ‘War Diary’ – sweet and beautiful images showing a happy child playing outside, or in bed smiling up at his cat, or in the bathtub with a toy. But again – there is no ‘normal’. He’s not having a bath; the tub is empty. The bathroom is the safest place in the flat to hide from shrapnel and blasts, providing two solid walls. Children sleep in bathtubs all over Ukraine, nestled in their duvets.
“It’s very difficult to be a mother during the war,” Artemova says. “I feel anxious all the time, it just exists in the background. Almost every day I have to make decisions, balancing the danger with the desire to live and develop.”
She wants her son Mykhail to be “open to the world”; instead, she must “teach him how to survive”. The final image in the extended series shows both their faces, caught in the mirror above a sink, as Mykhail washes his hands. He is looking down, focused on the tap’s flow, but Artemova stares into the phone held with both hands, just above his head; her arms and body form a shield around him. It gets across an immense desire to protect.
“I try to stand between my son and the horror that is happening. As much as I can, I do,” she says. She wants, like any parent, to give Mykhail a childhood. The reality of what he has to face brings a “terrible sadness”, even guilt.
She is determined to fight for him, and for her society too. “I really want to get through to people in the west,” she says, frustrated (and quite rightly) at the ebbing interest and failing pledges of support. “This danger exists for everyone, for all of Europe. Russia will not stop. No negotiations are possible.”
She sighs. “This is our tragedy, but not ours alone. I just so want to get through to people. Perhaps personal stories are more relatable, I don’t know. I just try to do whatever I can.”
Carrying only the essentials – no cameras – Artemova began shooting on her iPhone, hoping to capture something of their new reality. The series, ‘War Diary’, was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Pictet last year.
The family escaped from the besieged city on the second morning of the invasion, a dangerous journey by car to a small village in the countryside. But there, too, explosions sounded, and the dank cellar had to act as a shelter too [right].
“One of the most disturbing memories of that time – we woke up to the walls of the building literally shaking from a blast wave,” Artemova recalled.
As things became quieter in Kyiv in summer 2022, she took her son back to the city, but the Russians continued to strike intermittently, and they went back to the car park basement. “We waited out a massive rocket attack there,” she said. Her little boy could go out cycling with a friend on war summer days – but if caught out by an air raid alert, they’d go to hide in the basement. Being such a big space, they could continue to ride their bikes down there, waiting for the all-clear to sound. For an eight-year-old in Kyiv, that’s normal life now.