Words retreat in the face of hatred, both personal and all-encompassing. Elena Guseinova analyzes the photo of the week.

On the evening of February 9, Russian strike drones attacked Kharkiv from the Belgorod region. Several of them hit oil tanks at a fuel depot in the Nemyshlyanskyi district. The fuel leaked, mixed with snow, and spread through the streets, causing a large fire. Throughout the night and the following day, rescue workers fought the fire and searched for victims.

This photograph was taken by Georgy Ivanchenko on the same street in Kharkiv on the same night. And to describe this photograph, I cannot escape stereotypical phrases and rhetorical constructions: rivers of fire, the yellow-red silhouette of a half-burnt house, the darkness of the night sky, thick smoke creeping out of the house and dancing in the air. So the photograph I am looking at dissolves into simple metaphors and neutralizes an experience that I cannot comprehend. I return to the photograph in numbers: the fire covered an area of 3,700 square meters, nearly 200 rescuers, seven dead, two families, three children—7 years old, 4 years old, 10 months old. The tragedies that have already happened are beyond our ability to comprehend. And the need to know contradicts the desire not to see.

A rescuer tries to enter a burned-down house to find the dead. The yellow light of the smoldering house and the blue light of the rescuer's headlamp make the photo flat and even cut it in two — warm and cold. This confrontation between life and death again draws us into the realm of rhetoric. But this contrast is unstable — the fire that brings death turns out to be warm and life-giving, while the cold and deadly flashlight of the rescuer, who must extinguish this fire, is cold and deadly. This imaginary juxtaposition demonstrates the vulnerability of rhetoric. Even the efforts of 200 rescuers cannot save everyone. Words retreat in the face of hatred, both personal and all-encompassing. You cannot explain it to someone who has never gone down into a basement to the sound of air raid sirens, who has never seen yellow flames rising to the height of a building, who cannot tell the difference between the sound of a plane taking off and landing, who has never illuminated a war crime with their own headlamp.

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Olena Huseynova is a Ukrainian writer, radio host, and radio producer. She has been working at Radio Culture (Suspilne) since 2016. She is currently the editor-in-chief of the radio theater and literary programs department. Since February 26, 2022, Olena has been working as a live host of a round-the-clock news radio marathon on Ukrainian Radio (Suspilne). She is the author of two poetry books, “Open Rider” (2012) and “Superheroes” (2016). She writes essays and short prose.‍

Heorhii Ivanchenko is a Ukrainian photographer who has been working as a freelance reporter in documentary and journalistic photography since February 2022. From the first months of the invasion, he began shooting for the Associated Press and the European Pressphoto Agency. Starting in Borodianka, where Heorhii was born, he continued his journey along the front line: Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions, his attention is now focused on the Donetsk region. The turning point in his photography was the month he spent in Bakhmut. Throughout December and January, he documented the lives of the townspeople, carrying a backpack and sleeping bag, sharing the daily life of the locals in basements, with volunteers, medics, soldiers, and firefighters. In April, while working on a story about Chasiv Yar in Donbas, his car was shot and destroyed by a Russian shell. The author continues to reflect on the numerous situations he encountered along the way and is working on his first project, “Way of War” (working title).

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Read also: Pain is universal, evil is real. Olena Huseynova analyzes the photo of the week