Again about the photo that did not stop the war

This will be a different text from those that are usually published in this column. In the context of recent discussions in the professional community and beyond, I am making another unsubstantiated assumption: we are angry because nothing is stopping the war.

I hesitated between the images of the aftermath of all the recent Russian attacks on our cities, during which the Russians killed a number of real people. It's hard to avoid some kind of tragedy. In the information flood of documentary images without context, even a city cannot always be correctly identified on its internal map... this is about the amount of grief that has been drowning the country for quite a few years now.

I chose this photo of Serhiy Korovainyi because I want to move away from the indignation, because I can't choose any other photo today because of what is happening in my mind, because I personally need to be quiet. The photo shows a moment after the shelling of Kyiv on April 24, 2025. What can you say about it? It is dawning again. And again, no photo has stopped this war.

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The pictures of the aftermath at have sparked a whirlwind of emotional discussions, accusations, responses, and recommendations. I don't feel entitled to condemn, recommend, or support, because I don't know what is right. And discussion is inevitable. It would be good to look for a support to lean on for reflection, analysis, and approach. Susan Sontag's “Observing the Pain of Others,” which I think has been said more than once, can be this support.

As for , any documentary (photo, text, video) seeks to make a clear distinction between professional documentation of reality (the word documentation has recently been used in and makes me gag, it has been so overused and overstated) and one's own professional self-assertion. It's a difficult distinction to make. How many photographers does it take to capture a single moment? I'm not sure, maybe ten. But I don't know.

When we are talking about places that are difficult to get to, where usually only a few journalists work, often at great risk to themselves, no photo - the bloodiest one - has caused much outrage. The photos from Mariupol were unanimously valuable to everyone, no matter what was in those pictures. Everything was normal. Everything was ethical. Everything was hopeful. We wanted the world to see us and stop the war.

In March 2022, in Chernihiv, I wanted more photos, more people to take photos of Chernihiv, so that no one would ask me if our cafes were open the moment we got through the connection. Perhaps I was asked this because there were not many documentary filmmakers in Chernihiv who worked for international media. In March 2022, we didn't discuss any image of the atrocity from the point of view of “should we” because we hoped that there was some chance that the Russians could be stopped by showing the truth. The current discussion was about the fact that a photo takes away a person's subjectivity, whereas this subjectivity could sometimes be quietly taken away at the beginning of a full-scale war-for the sake of an imaginary civilized world that still seems to have not understood something. Now we are increasingly hesitant, and with good reason.

From Mariupol we needed proof, from the world we needed sympathy and help, and when we now run into an ever-increasing wall of indifference erected by the same world, it seems that we are starting to get angry with each other because the photo doesn't work, and because all the previous photos didn't work, and because they can't work at all.

This unstoppability of the war is also a thing that is connected to mass culture and the aura of certain iconic photos. If you search for Napalm Girl, you will find a lot of materials built around the headline “the photo that stopped the war.” Certain iconic photographs have formed a legend around them that is stronger than reality. In particular, this is a photo taken by Nick Utah in Vietnam in 1972: a nine-year-old naked girl running and screaming in pain. This photo is famous and discussed. And importantly, it did not stop the war. It's just that photographs, books, and documentaries don't stop war. Nothing stops war, not weapons, and not the decisions of those who started it.

We have already seen dozens of pictures that should have stopped everything in an ideal human world. And they did not. And then the ethical discussion begins. Because nothing stopped. If it had, there would be nothing to talk about. The only thing is that they don't have the photos, and even if they did, they can't.

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Photo: Serhiy Korovainyi
Text: Vira Kuriko