Photo with history: The reign of detail

Yesterday and today, as in the last century, photographs show us the share of suffering that we should understand and perhaps try on ourselves, in which there is nothing evil. It is customary to show suffering, it still works, attracts attention. After all, the zealous Christian says that we get something better for our suffering when we die. Only today you can become blind from suffering, and during the Christmas holidays suddenly get indignant that there are not enough train tickets, and start to get angry with Ukrzaliznytsia: how is it possible, for a lottery, not to get anywhere, why can not you give an extra car? Without thinking about the number of burned, destroyed or converted trains for evacuation.

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I appreciate not flashy pictures. When the Russians hit a cafe in Grozh in Kharkiv region, dozens of journalists and photographers went there at the same time, because fifty-nine people were killed at a memorial dinner for a soldier from the same village, who was finally reburied at home. Covered in sheets of the body on the ground, weeping women cover the horror of their faces with their own hands, their chests of stones under which people can still remain — these images could shock for at least a few seconds if there was no one and nothing in the Thunderstorm, and if the mother — they could even paralyze. More than a year later, I remember them, somewhere they wander in memories, but I do not catch any. Instead, a photograph taken from the height of a bird's flight appears to be real and non-existent, with no memory blurs: the autumn earth and dozens of freshly dug holes are everything. The more complex a photograph or picture (grief on it or joy), the more attractive it is to the eye, the more closely we look at it, chained by the curiosity and excitement of the researcher. But as soon as we step a few steps back, when a day, a month and a year passes, we are unlikely to reproduce that image in all the details. Another thing is a simple detail. For what is difficult about the color of the earth, which has just been shaken from a shovel near the tenth hole in the cemetery.

So in this picture, which was taken in October by photographer Roman Pylypiy. I have no idea what is behind this iron and sweaty glass: the window of the usual Ukrzaliznytsia train car, suspended handrails, so this is not an ordinary car. Most likely — the medical car of the evacuation train. The hand is bandaged, the hand is held, that is, the person is definitely alive, but wounded. Was the injured person brought or taken in this carriage from the front? The fact that I do not see a person does not change anything. If it is not someone I know personally, most likely I will lose their face over time. What I won't lose is this hand. Just because I don't see the situation doesn't mean I don't know about it. Reality itself seeps through all the cracks. This picture seems to reveal the infinite simplicity of the documentary — the utterance of a detail that remains watchful over us.

I appreciate not flashy pictures. They are struck not by the twisted body of a murdered baby on a dirty March side, not by the heroic moment of a raised flag over a liberated city, but by a trifle that has neither a drop of blood nor a drop of pride. They do not impose anything on us, do not offer to rejoice or be horrified, instead the details hidden in them do not allow us to succumb to the sin of simplification and turn away.

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Photo: Roman Pylypiy

Text: Vera Kuriko