Galina, a survivor of Holidamor, Stalin's man-made famine, where more than four million Ukrainians were starved to death, sits in front of her home in a small village in the Chernihiv Region in north-central Ukraine. In February of 2022, she watched Russian tanks roll through the fields behind her home.
In June 2022, I arrived in Kyiv and installed myself in Ukraine for the next year. I made a deliberate choice not to attach myself to the press corps but to work independently. This allowed me the freedom to choose the subject of my work and immerse myself in it to collect stories behind my images. I traveled widely across Ukraine, traversing the country from east to west, north to south, recording the effects of conflict in war-torn regions and the deep rear. My particular focus, however, has been the cities and villages along the eastern front, liberated in September-October 2022 after a six-month Russian occupation. While many of my colleagues photographed battlefields, armor, and soldiers, I focused on how war impacts ordinary people's lives, families, homes, and neighborhoods.
A Story in Light and Shadows
“I’ve never made any picture, good or bad, without paying for it in emotional turmoil.” - W. Eugine Smith
On my 20th birthday, my father passed to me his father's camera, a 1935 Leica IIIa rangefinder. The last time I had seen my grandfather’s camera was in his hands as he told stories of the places and people that once stood before his lens; I was 13. Through the same lens, I would learn photography, make discoveries, and develop my style. With my grandfather’s Leica IIIa, I learned how to communicate visually and build relationships with complete strangers. It was during this time that I embarked on a formal study of photography under renowned fine arts photographer Keith Carter, who would become my lifelong mentor and friend. My time with Keith allowed me to understand the history of my craft and discover many of the great documentary photographers that came before me: W. Eugine Smith, Robert Capa, Walker Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Lee Miller, Robert Frank, and Sally Mann. Keith motivated and encouraged me to be more than just a recorder of time but to create timeless photographs that convey important messages.
In addition to this, the experience of growing up as a white male in Southeast Texas proved formative for my work as a photographer. I came of age in a place where bus stops were full of black women waiting to get to their jobs to service the lifestyles of white people, where a black woman who helped raise me was claimed to be part of the family but never invited to a family dinner, and where candidly bigoted conversations took place at my family gatherings. These experiences moved me to explore themes of prejudice, human agency, displacement, and loss through my lens. My earlier work focused on documenting the plight of immigrants on the US-Mexican border, Texas death row, and racial tensions in East Texas.
On June 22, 2000, while on assignment covering the execution of Gary Graham in Huntsville, Texas, I was beaten by a large mob, an experience that left physical and psychological traumas. It was the latter that caused me to abandon a prospective trip to document the Naxalite-Maoist insurgency in India and other trips to conflict zones, something I always felt compelled to do. I found myself unable to muster the resolve to go.
This changed in early March 2022. I was on the phone with a colleague in Warsaw as we watched Russian airstrikes in Ukraine, a country that seemed far away and about which I knew very little. My colleague, a conflict writer, suggested that I travel to the Ukraine border to document the millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing to safety across the Polish border. It was then that something changed inside me; I set aside my past trauma and bought a ticket for Warsaw, my first trip to Europe.
I spent three weeks on the Polish-Ukrainian border, where in one day, at one crossing, more than 120,000 people would cross from Ukraine into Poland, most with nothing but the clothes on their back and a few bags of possessions: mothers with infants, women pushing shopping carts with children and belongings, teenagers who traveled alone for hundreds of miles, tears, thousands of eyes filled with loss and uncertainty. The following 14 months changed my life and my understanding of the role of the photographer and photography as a medium for recording and conveying the human condition.
In June 2022, I arrived in Kyiv and installed myself in Ukraine for the next year. I made a deliberate choice not to attach myself to the press corps but to work independently. This allowed me the freedom to choose the subject of my work and immerse myself in it to collect stories behind my images. I traveled widely across Ukraine, traversing the country from east to west, north to south, recording the effects of conflict in war-torn regions and the deep rear. My particular focus, however, has been the cities and villages along the eastern front, liberated in September-October 2022 after a six-month Russian occupation. While many of my colleagues photographed battlefields, armor, and soldiers, I focused on how war impacts ordinary people's lives, families, homes, and neighborhoods.
One of the stories I recorded in Ukraine is the story of Misha, a middle-aged man from Izyum, a city in eastern Ukraine, which suffered Russian bombardment and six-months occupation. In March 2022, Misha survived an attack by a Russian bomber that dropped a delayed detonation bomb on his apartment building, ripping it in half and leaving 54 residents dead. Among those were all seven members of Misha’s family, including his wife of 40 years, his daughter, and three grandchildren. I met Misha when I visited Izyum shortly after its de-occupation by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in September 2022.
When I arrived at 2 Pershotravneva Street, Misha was standing on a debris field next to a small memorial of his family. Small shrines marked the landscape, 54 to be exact. Misha’s eyes cast a distant stare. In a matter of seconds, I would reach out my hand and say “привіт” (hello). Glass broke beneath our feet as we walked, and the sounds of twisted metal scraped against the skeletal remains of his home. I listened, patiently, to Misha recount the last hour that he spent with his family before witnessing their deaths. With tears in his eyes and hesitation in his voice, he explained that his 3-year-old granddaughter Iryna asked him for tea. As he exited the safety of the basement to make tea, his wife stopped him to say that she would come with him. It was at this exact moment that the bomb fell onto their apartment building. Misha survived but his entire family perished. As Misha told the story he wept, and I wept with him. In sharing the account with me, Misha relived his pain, in a hope that the world might gain a better understanding of the war in Ukraine.
I photographed Misha in monochrome, to capture the depth of his anguish and draw the viewer to connect with the loss and destruction of the conflict. Besides Misha’s portrait, I took photos of artifacts left behind in his destroyed building. These artifacts bear witness to the ordinary everyday lives that once lived here but now snuffed out by extraordinary, senseless violence. The still lives contextualize Misha’s story and foreground the impact of the war on so many more ordinary people and their families.
I returned from Ukraine in June 2023 and embarked on selecting and editing images for a traveling exhibition and a book, as well as reconstructing the stories behind these photographs from my journals. Professionally, my work in Ukraine pushed me to contemplate photography's role as a medium that creates emotional and intellectual connections between humans suffering unthinkable, unimaginable circumstances and the viewer, removed in space and time from this suffering.
Personally, my time in Ukraine allowed me to witness humanity at its best and its worst. Bearing witness to massive displacement of people, destruction of life and property, and the unprovoked killing of innocent civilians, as well as to the resilience, perseverance, and courage led me to see the world in my viewfinder through a different lens.
https://williampatrickphotography.com/
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