What happens is that only dogs are left in the town, and time goes crazy in it.
A reasonable fear of obvious metaphors always tries to stop the author, but how hard is it to avoid them when it comes to a town called Chasiv Yar. How to avoid the metaphor of a town devastated by war, which now belongs to dogs and memories to some extent, to the few remaining people with weapons (because they need to somehow fight off those dogs), and most importantly to the military, who need to defend the town from the Russians, no matter what ravine or abyss of numbed time and memory the fighting may plunge it into.
This photo was taken from the fifth floor of a building in Chasovyi Yar, Donetsk Oblast, by Oleh Petrasyuk, a Ukrainian documentary photographer and member of the 24th Brigade. His brigade has been working in the Chasovyi Yar area since June. The author of the photo is a constant witness to the destruction: he said he saw the charred skeleton of a house, and during his next visit, bushes and grass sprouted inside the house, and by the third visit, nothing remained but the crater itself.
On that day, Oleh Petrasyuk entered the city unarmed, which he regretted, because those dogs on the path that can be seen from the fifth floor of the house are dogs that sometimes need to be fought off. They feel better here than people do, they organize themselves into packs, and they live the way they manage to live in war. You can say that the Russians are trying to take over the city, but the dogs have already taken it over.
In the third week of March 2022, Chernihiv was nowhere near ruin, except for the devastating fear of ruin. However, it was slowly losing people, traffic, and the noise of the streets, where dogs began to wander out in small packs: street dogs beaten by life, and now white poodles and delicate-haired black shepherds. They scurried between the endless morning queues of cars that were trying to get out again in vain, and between the garbage cans of the alley with restaurants. Only there were no visitors or leftovers on the alley, and the trash cans were completely empty, so the dogs passed the alley and moved on, toward the river port. A shepherd dog abandoned by someone still casts an angry glance at me and the pack that is walking slowly down the street.
For eight years, my father has been telling the same stories about the dogs that trod the paths to their dugouts and houses in the destroyed villages where the military had been so carefully disguised. The same man tamed the dog himself, he said, and now at the front, dogs are sentinels of war, having no position, just looking for humans for a while before moving away from them forever.
The Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, a witness (a regular, a guest?) of African wars, wrote about Luanda, the capital of Angola, on the verge of being surrounded. He described how the city becomes deserted as people pack their lives into wooden boxes and strive at all costs to get on the last plane or ship that will take them away from a place that is about to disappear, perhaps tomorrow. As the police leave first, followed by firefighters, then garbage collectors, and then bakers and postmen (who will write a letter to a city that will disappear tomorrow), the city becomes like a “dead bone sticking out of the ground toward the sun.” Everything was dying in Luanda before Kapuscinski's eyes, and in the end, he writes, only the packs of dogs remained-almost an international open-air dog show of all breeds.
Only, Ryszard notes, the dogs eventually left. Someone in charge took the responsibility of getting his pack out of Luanda. At least Ryszard did not see a single dead dog. They were just lounging in the sun in the grass, but when the final end came, either by the final end or by the fear of the final end, even the dogs died, and the city fell into a complete daze.
What happens is that only dogs are left in the town, and time goes to the dogs. And when the dogs conquer the town, every other town can look at it as if it were a mirror. As if into water.
Text: Vira Kuriko
Photo: Oleh Petrasyuk
What happens is that only dogs are left in the town, and time goes crazy in it.
A reasonable fear of obvious metaphors always tries to stop the author, but how hard is it to avoid them when it comes to a town called Chasiv Yar. How to avoid the metaphor of a town devastated by war, which now belongs to dogs and memories to some extent, to the few remaining people with weapons (because they need to somehow fight off those dogs), and most importantly to the military, who need to defend the town from the Russians, no matter what ravine or abyss of numbed time and memory the fighting may plunge it into.
This photo was taken from the fifth floor of a building in Chasovyi Yar, Donetsk Oblast, by Oleh Petrasyuk, a Ukrainian documentary photographer and member of the 24th Brigade. His brigade has been working in the Chasovyi Yar area since June. The author of the photo is a constant witness to the destruction: he said he saw the charred skeleton of a house, and during his next visit, bushes and grass sprouted inside the house, and by the third visit, nothing remained but the crater itself.
On that day, Oleh Petrasyuk entered the city unarmed, which he regretted, because those dogs on the path that can be seen from the fifth floor of the house are dogs that sometimes need to be fought off. They feel better here than people do, they organize themselves into packs, and they live the way they manage to live in war. You can say that the Russians are trying to take over the city, but the dogs have already taken it over.
In the third week of March 2022, Chernihiv was nowhere near ruin, except for the devastating fear of ruin. However, it was slowly losing people, traffic, and the noise of the streets, where dogs began to wander out in small packs: street dogs beaten by life, and now white poodles and delicate-haired black shepherds. They scurried between the endless morning queues of cars that were trying to get out again in vain, and between the garbage cans of the alley with restaurants. Only there were no visitors or leftovers on the alley, and the trash cans were completely empty, so the dogs passed the alley and moved on, toward the river port. A shepherd dog abandoned by someone still casts an angry glance at me and the pack that is walking slowly down the street.
For eight years, my father has been telling the same stories about the dogs that trod the paths to their dugouts and houses in the destroyed villages where the military had been so carefully disguised. The same man tamed the dog himself, he said, and now at the front, dogs are sentinels of war, having no position, just looking for humans for a while before moving away from them forever.
The Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski, a witness (a regular, a guest?) of African wars, wrote about Luanda, the capital of Angola, on the verge of being surrounded. He described how the city becomes deserted as people pack their lives into wooden boxes and strive at all costs to get on the last plane or ship that will take them away from a place that is about to disappear, perhaps tomorrow. As the police leave first, followed by firefighters, then garbage collectors, and then bakers and postmen (who will write a letter to a city that will disappear tomorrow), the city becomes like a “dead bone sticking out of the ground toward the sun.” Everything was dying in Luanda before Kapuscinski's eyes, and in the end, he writes, only the packs of dogs remained-almost an international open-air dog show of all breeds.
Only, Ryszard notes, the dogs eventually left. Someone in charge took the responsibility of getting his pack out of Luanda. At least Ryszard did not see a single dead dog. They were just lounging in the sun in the grass, but when the final end came, either by the final end or by the fear of the final end, even the dogs died, and the city fell into a complete daze.
What happens is that only dogs are left in the town, and time goes to the dogs. And when the dogs conquer the town, every other town can look at it as if it were a mirror. As if into water.
Text: Vira Kuriko
Photo: Oleh Petrasyuk
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.
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