In opposition to Picture Fatigue: On Researching and Curating Photography from Ukraine – Notes

Kateryna Filyuk, editor of Researching and Curating Photography from Ukraine: Reflections, Perspectives, Challenges, printed by the University of Salford and 89books, opens her essay on up to date photographic practices with a dialogue of Sasha Kurmaz’s sequence Red Horse (2022–25). Quoting the Images Vevey Prize jury, which awarded the mission the Grand Prix in 2023, she highlights its “fragmented, multilayered approach … [that] mirrors the fragmented nature of our reality, especially in the context of war.” In Filyuk’s studying, Red Horse turns into some extent of departure for exploring how up to date artists intertwine the private with the general public, and inventive experimentation with documentary observe.

This sense of fragmentation and overlapping temporalities additionally informs the e book itself. Composed as a community of views, it brings collectively voices that map the Ukrainian photographic discipline from inside. The quantity attends not solely to iconic photos and canonical figures that outline the historical past of images in Ukraine, but additionally to fragile infrastructures and dispersed archives, to what stays invisible or ignored. Inevitably, the conflict emerges as a watershed, remodeling each the medium and those that have interaction with it.

The supplies within the quantity will be roughly divided into three classes. The first contains historic overviews and makes an attempt to hint the trajectories of Ukrainian images: rethinking periodization, revisiting key figures, restoring misplaced connections, and reflecting on architectural images as a hybrid house the place propaganda, inventive experimentation, and the documentation of city historical past intersect.

The second group of texts displays on images within the up to date context of Russia’s navy aggression: a renewed give attention to documentary observe, fatigue with conflict photos, the erosion of belief in visible proof, reflections on the moral limits of illustration, and the shifting position of Ukrainian photographers, who, as Oleksandra Osadcha rightly observes, discover themselves within the paradoxical place of being each “insiders” and “outsiders” to the disaster.

The third trajectory brings collectively fieldwork, curatorial, and archival practices formed by the urgency of conflict. Projects resembling Odesa Photo Days and the Ukrainian Warchive Initiative present how curatorial work turns into a type of care and solidarity, targeted on preserving photos, sustaining connections, and maintaining Ukrainian images viable and visual amid dislocation and loss.

If a number of contributors to the amount (Kateryna Radchenko and Oleksandra Osadcha) level to the heightened position of documentary images in Ukraine as one of many defining options of the present second, the part “The Transformation of Photography During Wartime: Photographic Practices in Ukraine Since February 2022” extra clearly illuminates the explanations for this shift. Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, documentary images in Ukraine has functioned not merely as a style however as a vital civic observe: a method of countering disinformation, bearing witness, and preserving lived expertise.

The transcribed panel dialogue “Curating and Researching Photography from Ukraine” exhibits that not solely particular person photographers but additionally small establishments and impartial initiatives have been based or reoriented with the attention that “Russian narratives were being used to manipulate history and justify the invasion, war crimes” (Emine Ziyatdin). These initiatives have been based with the purpose to “counter misinformation” (Max Gorbatskyi), as exemplified by Ukrainian Photographies and the Ukrainian Warchive Initiative, introduced within the quantity alongside the Odesa Photo Days Festival.

Oleksandra Osadcha expands the dialogue in her essay “Regarding the Pain of One’s Own: Ukrainian Photographers in Times of War,” observing that Ukrainian photographers function not solely throughout the realities of an info conflict but additionally inside a broader discipline of traditionally formed skepticism towards the picture, notably towards pictures of conflict and violence. This skepticism is rooted in Western important thought on images. Osadcha traces this family tree of doubt from Theodor Adorno to John Berger, Susan Sontag, Allan Sekula, and Martha Rosler, suggesting, after Bruno Latour, the time period “iconoclash” to explain this discourse. Unlike iconoclasm, this discourse is marked by uncertainty: “One is troubled by an action [towards the image] for which there is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive.” For Ukrainian artists, this rigidity interprets right into a double bind: the necessity to doc the conflict, participating in what Asia Bazdyrieva and Svitlana Matviyenko (as cited by Osadcha) name “the labor of witnessing” on the one hand, and the attention of a traditionally and theoretically embedded distrust in photographic testimony on the opposite.

Documentary images will not be the one mode via which the expertise of conflict is explored on this quantity. Kateryna Radchenko attracts consideration to the therapeutic dimension of images, one which extends past skilled observe to anybody holding a smartphone. She discusses a mission by Kateryna Alieksieienko that weaves collectively portraits, fragments of interviews, and pictures drawn from the individuals’ personal telephones to convey the expertise of fleeing shelled cities, struggling to board evacuation trains, and navigating the disrupted routines of wartime life seen from inside. In her evaluation of vernacular pictures from the frontline, Radchenko factors to the prevalence of self-portraits amongst troopers, photos that categorical “an act through which you make yourself feel alive; … an act of self-remembrance.”

Questions relating to the ethics of illustration are a central thread all through the amount. In the contributions by Kateryna Radchenko and Kateryna lakovlenko, they tackle explicit urgency. Radchenko speaks of a rising fatigue with conflict imagery: “We hear more and more often that people are tired of seeing destroyed houses or people who have been killed.” In an oversaturated visible surroundings, photos of destruction more and more produce emotional exhaustion and detachment. At the identical time, as lakovlenko notes, this response doesn’t essentially sign a lack of sensitivity. She interprets the circulation of photos of violence as “a cry for help,” a gesture that requires a response but additionally reveals the boundaries of 1’s capability to behave: “When you see such images, you have to respond somehow—there is this responsibility around acting on it.” But for most individuals, “this is too difficult.”

In Ukraine, questions of photographic ethics are now not confined to theoretical discourse however have change into a part of lived expertise. As Oleksandra Osadcha observes, the dilemma of photographing the conflict is shared by everybody who may sooner or later change into its topic. In response, some artists search an moral distance, a method of talking in regards to the conflict with out inflicting additional ache on these it touches (Oleksandra Osadcha on Chairs, 2022, by Elena Subach). Others rethink the temporality of illustration, delaying the act of displaying till a extra acceptable second, as a gesture of affection and care (Kateryna Iakovlenko on Photography from the Future Year, 2023, by Katya Buchatska).

In the transcription of a panel on present institutional and analysis practices, Ukrainian curators replicate on a brand new problem: the best way to maintain public consideration amid the visible saturation of conflict imagery. Kateryna Radchenko (Odesa Photo Days Festival) observes that “visual content had lost its immediate impact.” As photos of destruction and violence started to lose their affective cost, curators turned to new narrative approaches that related the expertise of conflict with broader historic and cultural contexts. This perspective resonates with the general conception of the convention that the e book relies on and is mirrored within the quantity’s historic part.

Olena Chervonik reconsiders the Kharkiv School as an early manifestation of Ukrainian postmodernism, increasing the notion of Soviet-era dissent past the political to incorporate aesthetic resistance. In distinction, the panel on Iryna Pap (Izvestia’s chief photograph correspondent within the Ukrainian SSR from 1957 to 1972) foregrounds points central to Soviet official images—the necessity to reassess the position of ladies in photojournalism, to research recurring tropes of Ukraine’s illustration in propaganda imagery, and to confront the paradoxical legacy of Soviet visible tradition in at the moment’s Ukraine.

Education and coaching infrastructures, each formal and casual, emerge all through the amount as a recurring theme, revealing the essential position of mediators in shaping the historical past of Ukrainian images. Iryna Pap, who grew to become dean of the photojournalism division on the Institute of Journalistic Excellence on the Union of Journalists of Ukraine in 1976, educated a technology that may later outline impartial Ukraine’s documentary images. The lately rediscovered hyperlink between Pap and one among her college students, Viktor Marushchenko, was highlighted within the panel devoted to his legacy. The dialogue portrayed him each because the creator of the landmark documentary sequence Chornobyl and Dreamland Donbas (2003) and as an educator whose images faculty, based in 2004, performed a pivotal position in shaping Ukraine’s up to date photographic discipline.

The query of the archive, each in inventive and curatorial practices, runs all through the amount. In the Ukrainian post-Soviet context, marked by weakened institutional constructions and the long-standing outflow of archival supplies to the previous imperial middle, the very notion of the archive requires a profound rethinking. Whereas in post-structuralist principle, from Michel Foucault to Allan Sekula, the archive is known as an equipment of energy, normalization, and choice, for Ukrainian researchers and artists it turns into an area of mnemonic restoration, of reconstructing marginalized histories and restoring misplaced connections.

In Alex Bykov’s keynote “‘It Wasn’t That Long Ago’: Kyiv in 20th Century Architectural Photography,” the archive seems not as a steady repository however as a wreck to be repaired. Since the collapse of the USSR, “much of the information has been lost, destroyed, or sold off.” Materials retrieved from the gray market, scattered publications, propaganda photograph albums, and personal household archives lay the groundwork for a observe of reconstruction, a type of archaeology of imaginative and prescient. In these pictures, Bykov identifies a selected gaze of architect-photographers that reveals each the unique development initiatives, typically obscured by later modifications, and an ironic, important view of Soviet society. Ultimately, these archives change into “a lens through which to view the Soviet period, providing nuanced and multifaceted perspectives on a time and place that continue to shape contemporary discussions of identity, history, and culture in Ukraine.”

Another archival impulse underpins present initiatives aimed toward preserving the photographic file of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. The central query posed by the staff behind the Ukrainian Warchive Initiative—“What happens to all their hard drives, to all the digital work [photographers] have produced?”—displays a really actual worry of dropping one’s personal voice and reminiscence. As Kateryna Iakovlenko notes, “If we went back to 2014 … and searched for images from the front line from that time, it would probably be challenging to find the exact image that we wanted … because of the vast amounts of information that is just lost on the internet.” These phrases learn as a warning: regardless of ongoing efforts at accumulating, cataloging, and digital archiving, “we don’t know what will be saved after the war.” Paradoxically, what has been described as “the most documented” and “the most networked” conflict in historical past might also show to be some of the troublesome to protect, its huge digital archive already slipping into oblivion.

The e book’s power lies not in setting up a “grand narrative” however in the best way it frames present conversations about images. Alongside analytical essays, it retains the conversational tone of the panels—a deliberate editorial selection that conveys the immediacy and vitality of the discussions. Taken collectively, these voices current Ukrainian images not as a completed story however as a discipline of ongoing reflection on the moral, mnemonic, and civic dimensions of photographic observe. Rather than yielding to picture fatigue, they reclaim the picture as an area of resistance, creativeness, and care.