The Sky Is Blue but the Sun Isn’t Shining
April 2014 - February 23, 2022
After protests in Kyiv drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power in February 2014, eastern Ukraine was convulsed by a Russian-inspired and Russian-backed insurgency that evolved into a full-fledged war centered in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, an industrial region known as Donbas. This was the first Russian invasion.
I’ve been photographing the war, and civilian life surrounding it, since its early days in April 2014.
For eight years, the war ground on, stuck in an uneasy stalemate while delivering a steady stream of death and injury. For civilians living near the front line, conflict is like the weather, an uncontrollable condition of the environment with which one must contend daily. Everyone continues their business as best they can with a practiced sense of normalcy, revealing the remarkable human ability to adapt and carry on.
For soldiers, enthusiasm for the cause is tempered by the toil and terror of survival.
My portrayal takes a humanistic perspective to consider that the vast majority of people touched by this phase of the war, civilians and soldiers alike, on all sides, are victims whose lives have been irreversibly altered by forces beyond their control – forces that, as in all wars, originate with a deliberate choice to kill. My pictures also emphasize the inherent absurdity of armed conflict: the shock of the unimaginable juxtaposed with the utterly mundane.
The lesson I’ve taken is that political differences slip into political violence with remarkable ease, and once unleashed these forces develop a logic of their own.
Zine
A 40-page self-published newspaper and exhibition catalog of photographs from the war in eastern Ukraine, taken between 2014 and 2017.
21cm x 28cm (folded)
Edition of 2000 (Ukrainian language), 2018
Collections: DePaul University Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago Zine Fest Collection
Traveling Exhibition
Brotherland: War in Ukraine is currently traveling Ukraine as an exhibition consisting of 26 photographs, three 360º videos, and a self-published newspaper.
