Some time in our lives, even if it happened during the war, will still retain the feeling that the landscape is about the peace and beauty of existence. The arched forest, into which the dusty, rustling road under the wheels of a bicycle is about to bump, should bring joy, not harm, if you act according to the rules of this place: do not go off the path, do not pick or put in your mouth what you do not know, or destroy a bird's home.
This is the forest under my house, and in this forest I love a deep hole overgrown with too much green grass and unknown shrubs. But the most important thing at the bottom is blueberry bushes. So I slide down like a ball to crush a blueberry between my index finger and thumb, which seems to be as big as a home-grown strawberry. I'm sure that the forest and its landscape are safe, it doesn't threaten me. I grew up in its fascinating thickets and remnants of swamps, this landscape shaped me, kept my world small, where no one is looking for a way in and from which I am unlikely to ever cut a path.
So I roll into the pit like a ball, and only then does my grandmother tell me that the pit is a crater from a 1941 air raid. That is, incredibly large blueberries grow in a bomb crater, I wonder, and my grandmother worries that where the grass is greener than the rest, the bomb has not exploded: can a beautiful landscape swallow a bomb?
I still don't see anything wrong with a bomb crater if it's so green and nurtures such large blueberries-it's beautiful. Bombs are ugly. I think so for no particular reason, even though I haven't read a single book about the war yet, and my war is still far ahead of me.
The photographer Roman Zakrevsky has always seemed to me to be a master of the little things. He is the photographer for whom I have the greatest sentiment. Not least because he and I were brought up together and are largely connected by the same landscapes of northern Ukraine, our common Chernihiv and the dense nooks and crannies of the region. After all, it's hard not to have sentiments for the person with whom you sat on a thousand-year-old Chernihiv mound, pondering how much love a chestnut that has just sprouted here needs to become a big tree.
Roman, who is now not only a photographer but also a soldier, took this photo in the east, near Kramatorsk. And it's a very strange feeling to observe the landscapes in his photographs for a year now, which do not resemble the Polissia region that he and I are used to.
Roman came across this outcrop during one of his shoots, and it attracted his attention because of its difference from the perspective of the north and the Chernihiv skyline. Roman sees strength in this rock. He could compare it to an earlier experience he had: he was once in the countryside and sat for a while surrounded by beehives. It was evening, the bees were flocking and preparing for sleep, and their humming - definitely primitive - seemed pleasantly familiar to Roman, even though it was the first time he had heard such a hum. Looking at the rock, Roman felt something similar.
Most likely, the rocky chimeras in the photo are the outcrops of chalk cliffs that are spread out in this part of the country near Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka. These rocks are the remains of those who lived in the local sea depths nine tens of millions of years ago. That is, this beauty is a pure hiding place of dying, and also its consequence and purpose. Someone ninety million years ago became a rock and a whole experience by which we recognize the world today. Perhaps the writer Taras Prokhasko (who, fortunately for us, is also a biologist) said it best in his “Lexicon of Secret Knowledge”: “The key to any experience is dying [...] The maximum experience is needed in order to die in one's own way. And in order to become a dead forest for someone, a whole wasteland of additional experience.” And according to him, there is no false or unnecessary experience.
***
We prefer the landscape to remain safe, or at least not threatening us at this very moment. Waves of fields, cut quarries, trampled floodplains of streams under the road. What if the landscape could take the form of our experiences, which we attach to the thin tops of spruce trees where fog falls from the mountains, or granite outcrops above a river narrowing where river mussels can be caught with our hands? Don't we ourselves give the landscape our pains, fears, and joys? We want the rocky outcropping under our feet to bring us peace, tranquility, balance, and even answers. How strange it is to ask the landscape for answers, but who else would you ask?
But the landscape is mostly silent, marked and sometimes doomed by our presence.
When any landscape is doomed by us, sooner or later it will become a battlefield. I think about the Dnipro on the surface, but also about the number of human bones that gathered on its black surface during the battles for Kyiv in World War II. In the fields near Uman, I would not be surprised if we dig trenches now and find one of Bohun's Cossacks who fell asleep on guard duty.
In addition to the desired peace, the landscapes could definitely take care of the calmness of memory and the slowness of recall. Landscapes seem to have been created to erase and hide everything we have done, good or bad. Any piece of iron can be swallowed by the forest, any tank skeleton can be caught by the claws of wild ivy, any bomb can be swallowed by the earth, and the river will gather bodies along its banks. Nature does not need our direction to hide everything. Not even to hide, no! Rather, it wants to envelop. To envelop all kinds of dying experiences, reminding us of life.
Photo: Roman Zakrevsky
Text: Vira Kuriko
Some time in our lives, even if it happened during the war, will still retain the feeling that the landscape is about the peace and beauty of existence. The arched forest, into which the dusty, rustling road under the wheels of a bicycle is about to bump, should bring joy, not harm, if you act according to the rules of this place: do not go off the path, do not pick or put in your mouth what you do not know, or destroy a bird's home.
This is the forest under my house, and in this forest I love a deep hole overgrown with too much green grass and unknown shrubs. But the most important thing at the bottom is blueberry bushes. So I slide down like a ball to crush a blueberry between my index finger and thumb, which seems to be as big as a home-grown strawberry. I'm sure that the forest and its landscape are safe, it doesn't threaten me. I grew up in its fascinating thickets and remnants of swamps, this landscape shaped me, kept my world small, where no one is looking for a way in and from which I am unlikely to ever cut a path.
So I roll into the pit like a ball, and only then does my grandmother tell me that the pit is a crater from a 1941 air raid. That is, incredibly large blueberries grow in a bomb crater, I wonder, and my grandmother worries that where the grass is greener than the rest, the bomb has not exploded: can a beautiful landscape swallow a bomb?
I still don't see anything wrong with a bomb crater if it's so green and nurtures such large blueberries-it's beautiful. Bombs are ugly. I think so for no particular reason, even though I haven't read a single book about the war yet, and my war is still far ahead of me.
The photographer Roman Zakrevsky has always seemed to me to be a master of the little things. He is the photographer for whom I have the greatest sentiment. Not least because he and I were brought up together and are largely connected by the same landscapes of northern Ukraine, our common Chernihiv and the dense nooks and crannies of the region. After all, it's hard not to have sentiments for the person with whom you sat on a thousand-year-old Chernihiv mound, pondering how much love a chestnut that has just sprouted here needs to become a big tree.
Roman, who is now not only a photographer but also a soldier, took this photo in the east, near Kramatorsk. And it's a very strange feeling to observe the landscapes in his photographs for a year now, which do not resemble the Polissia region that he and I are used to.
Roman came across this outcrop during one of his shoots, and it attracted his attention because of its difference from the perspective of the north and the Chernihiv skyline. Roman sees strength in this rock. He could compare it to an earlier experience he had: he was once in the countryside and sat for a while surrounded by beehives. It was evening, the bees were flocking and preparing for sleep, and their humming - definitely primitive - seemed pleasantly familiar to Roman, even though it was the first time he had heard such a hum. Looking at the rock, Roman felt something similar.
Most likely, the rocky chimeras in the photo are the outcrops of chalk cliffs that are spread out in this part of the country near Kramatorsk and Druzhkivka. These rocks are the remains of those who lived in the local sea depths nine tens of millions of years ago. That is, this beauty is a pure hiding place of dying, and also its consequence and purpose. Someone ninety million years ago became a rock and a whole experience by which we recognize the world today. Perhaps the writer Taras Prokhasko (who, fortunately for us, is also a biologist) said it best in his “Lexicon of Secret Knowledge”: “The key to any experience is dying [...] The maximum experience is needed in order to die in one's own way. And in order to become a dead forest for someone, a whole wasteland of additional experience.” And according to him, there is no false or unnecessary experience.
***
We prefer the landscape to remain safe, or at least not threatening us at this very moment. Waves of fields, cut quarries, trampled floodplains of streams under the road. What if the landscape could take the form of our experiences, which we attach to the thin tops of spruce trees where fog falls from the mountains, or granite outcrops above a river narrowing where river mussels can be caught with our hands? Don't we ourselves give the landscape our pains, fears, and joys? We want the rocky outcropping under our feet to bring us peace, tranquility, balance, and even answers. How strange it is to ask the landscape for answers, but who else would you ask?
But the landscape is mostly silent, marked and sometimes doomed by our presence.
When any landscape is doomed by us, sooner or later it will become a battlefield. I think about the Dnipro on the surface, but also about the number of human bones that gathered on its black surface during the battles for Kyiv in World War II. In the fields near Uman, I would not be surprised if we dig trenches now and find one of Bohun's Cossacks who fell asleep on guard duty.
In addition to the desired peace, the landscapes could definitely take care of the calmness of memory and the slowness of recall. Landscapes seem to have been created to erase and hide everything we have done, good or bad. Any piece of iron can be swallowed by the forest, any tank skeleton can be caught by the claws of wild ivy, any bomb can be swallowed by the earth, and the river will gather bodies along its banks. Nature does not need our direction to hide everything. Not even to hide, no! Rather, it wants to envelop. To envelop all kinds of dying experiences, reminding us of life.
Photo: Roman Zakrevsky
Text: Vira Kuriko
UAPP is an independent association of professional Ukrainian photographers, designed to protect their interests, support, develop and promote Ukrainian photography as an important element of national culture.
UAPP's activities span educational, social, research and cultural initiatives, as well as book publishing.
UAPP represents Ukrainian professional photography in the international photographic community and is an official member of the Federation of European Photographers (FEP) — an international organization representing more than 50,000 professional photographers in Europe and other countries around the world.
