Add to Queue: Simon Crofts’s Photography Books Beyond the Frame
A selection of curated media lists from our global community
words – simon crofts
location – edinburgh, uk
If I say ‘Ukraine’ there’s unfortunately a good chance that the first word that comes into your head may be ‘war.’ We have a duty to follow such terrible events, never to accept them or grow tired and stop watching and caring.
However, it’s also important not to let a place or people become defined by war. Books – and especially photobooks, which require the contemplative process of going out and taking series’ of photographs – are one way to get a window into a place beyond the pain of the latest missile strike.
I have my own close connections to Ukraine. I have visited many dozens of times over the last thirty years, and bought an idyllic Ukrainian cottage back in the 1990’s which is now right on the front lines, near Kherson. It is within this formerly idyllic cottage which our grandmother has been [just] surviving throughout this war.
So I compiled a selection of books, most of them connected to photography [but not only] – because they help to give a window into the truth of life in Ukraine. They don’t ignore the war but help, maybe, to give a deeper view of the country. This is the Ukraine we know and we love, well beyond the front line.
01_’The Land is Yellow, the Sky is Blue’ by Marc Wilson and Anna Nekrasova-Wilson
Marc has published a series of books looking at scars left on landscapes and people by past wars; notably, The Last Stand and A Wounded Landscape – the latter looking at memories of the Holocaust around Europe. His more recent [but not the latest] book ‘The Land is Yellow, the Sky is Blue,’ is jointly authored with his wife Anna. I am a little biased here, as I introduced Marc and Anna to one another so feel a little responsible for their marriage and, therefore, also the book! It is based around Balakliya, a small village in central Ukraine – the home of Anna’s family which has “stories filled with dreamy childhood memories and an anxiety shaped by the backdrop of war.” The Nekrasova-Wilson landscape is always heavily laden with the burden of memory, and perhaps also some tension about what the future might hold.
02_‘Horaivka’ by Anatoliy Babiychuk
Like Marc and Anna’s book about Balakliya, Anatoliy Babiychuk’s images are of what you might think of an archetypal, remote Ukrainian village, far from any urban centre. This village is called Horaivka, and it’s interesting to compare the different views of the two villages – Balakliya and Horaivka. The images are gentle and affectionate; readers are left with a bit of a utopian feel. That’s my own experience of a Ukrainian village not unlike this one; it is full of fruit and long, warm summer days. The war in the East, but not yet the full scale invasion, is already happening – but it seems to be a world away from Horaivka.
03_‘Bread & War’ by Felicity Spector
This book just came out this week, and the pictures in it are of food. But the key here is the text, which is about Spector’s encounters with the brave people who use food to support others – whether that is by feeding refugees or civilians without adequate food supplies in times of war, feeding troops or providing excellent food on trains. One of the chapters is about supplying food to civilians who are effectively cut off on the front line in the village of Antonivka – which just happens to be our own grandmother’s village. Spector organised food deliveries there, perhaps to grandma or, at least, to her neighbours. The story of the bravery of the cooks and those who risk their lives to deliver the food is not a war story that is told often, but it deserves to be – especially in such an engaging way.
04_‘Faces of War’ by Alexander Chekmenev
Chekmenev is a master of telling portraits: often lit by him in a way that picks out telling details, you can spend a long time looking around each image at objects in the frame, appreciating what is concealed in shadow and what is revealed. Faces of War shows survivors of occupation, and each face tells its own story and evidence of war crimes. These are slow portraits, in the best possible sense, which are full of empathy.
05_‘An Inconvenient Place’ by Antoine d’Agata Jonathan Littell
Antoine d’Agata started his project looking at the WWII-era execution site of Babyn Yar before the full-scale invasion. Finding a connection with the past was problematic, as Babyn Yar itself is now a park filled with families walking children. But the full scale invasion changed the nature of the project, and d’Agata found himself faced with the evidence of modern-day atrocities, as well as the effects of war seen through the psychiatric rehabilitation institution of Pavlivka. d’Agata’s images show the psychiatric horror of war and memory, and the unfortunate connection between modern day Ukraine and the past of Babyn Yar is shown with d’Agata’s own aesthetic.
06_‘Epitome’ by Vic Bakin
Vic Bakin is, I suppose, more of a visual artist rather than a documentarian; he sees his images as a kind of visual poem, using his archive to look at youth and masculinity and queer culture in Ukraine. His archive images began to take on a different, darker meaning as war intervened and some of the subjects enlisted in the armed forces, and he wove the portraits of people with images of war torn landscape.
07_‘Grey Bees’ by Andriy Kurkov
This is not a photobook at all, but I wanted to mention it because I found it to be powerful, observant and my favourite Kurkov book so far. It is about a beekeeper who lives in the ‘grey zone’ – the area of no man’s land between the front lines of both armed forces, and his adventures when he decides to go on a road trip. Kurkov always has surreal elements to his work, but they are within the bounds of the kind of surreal events that actually happen in real life when travelling through Ukraine. I loved this book; it’s not Kurkov’s latest, but do read it.
08_‘Pretty Ghetto’ by Polina Polikarpova
Polikarpova presents a kind, urban version of Babiychuk and Wilson’s books about Ukrainian villages. She is looking at the ‘pretty ghetto’ in which she grew up. The decaying urban jungle of the city might look grim to some, but it is a different kind of utopia. Polikarpova uses it as a background for playful images that have a fashion element, to create a kind of absurdity. The pictures are playful and emphasise decay, but they are also affectionate in their own very special way.
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