Photo with history: Who hasn't seen our cracks?

We can document the moment and document the consequences, and not just the next day, but everything that happens after, everything that flows out and transforms the recorded moment.

Authors, photographers, illustrators — any person who testifies to the reality of their own cities or regions shows this reality more restrained. When you enter a city that has just been shelled, or a city that is shrinking daily under the onslaught of the front, the eye naturally catches something striking, something cumbersome and obvious even without metaphor. In the view of local documentarians, there is much more simplicity, uncomplicated intersectionality, for which the reader, listener or viewer may sometimes not immediately grasp. For who else has not seen the cracks and pierce through the house? Especially in cities such as Kherson or Kharkov. Except for the fall of shells, there are times when neither projectiles nor rockets fly. There are seconds in which people play chess on the bench. And even seconds in which people do not clog windows with boards. In addition to the moment of loss, the permanence of loss reigns here.

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This picture was taken by Kherson photographer Ivan Antipenko after another night artillery shelling in the first weeks of November. Ivan heard explosions from his house, as he hears most of the shelling. This one happened nearby. Perhaps there was not a kilometer between Ivan and the impact. Perhaps if one of his non-local photographer colleagues stayed at his apartment that night, they would have gone there immediately. But John was alone, and, I suppose, he allowed himself to sleep and went there in the afternoon.

Municipal workers were already working on the site. On one of the balconies he saw four young guys who were just smoking, joking and laughing at those jokes. Ivan Antipenko calls it a fairly common thing: to stand like that and fatalistically joke about what happens here every day. Just laugh and smoke.

Then Ivan saw how one of the guys moved to another room of the battered apartment, exactly the one from which the projectile flew, and just sat down to smoke in this hole. We don't know, maybe it's even his room. Or a room of people he knew. Or didn't know. This is just another moment of Kherson routine.

“People live, smoke, laugh, ride trolleybuses, go to work. And at night you are fired upon and you go to help, because the same apartment of your acquaintance or mother's girlfriend, and anyone from whose home you now have keys in your pocket. Many people left here, leaving someone their keys: sometimes you have to water the flowers,” says Ivan. To water the flowers or to plug the hole that the projectile pierced.

Ivan and I are talking from the positions of two people very attached to the region about how to work in places that you know well: do we sometimes simplify the picture by the fact that too much context remains with us? When I choose not to describe Chernihiv ruins again and again, am I making the city better or worse? This shelling of Kherson is it possible to sleep today or not? By always being in place, do we have more room to maneuver or not at all?

When, in the first month after the Chernihiv deblockade, my foreign colleagues once again exposed me to the background of the ruins and asked what is the situation in the city today, I answered somewhere like this: “Well, yesterday I called a taxi. So, taxi drivers have already returned to the city, who know how to end the war, so, I suspect, everything is getting better.” At the time, colleagues from Spain did not understand my joke too much and, having paused the recording, asked me to speak a little more seriously and anxiously. Today, foreign colleagues do not squint at my similar stories about Chernihiv, but laugh with me.

Has the world already seen enough broken windows? Who else to show our cracks?

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Photo: Ivan Antipenko

Text: Vera Kuriko