On March 9, 2022, Russian troops launched an airstrike on a residential building at 2 Pershotravnev Street in Izium city, Kharkiv Oblast, Ukraine. The entrance of the building, April 17, 2025. Photograph: Kateryna Iakovlenko.
I came upon this spontaneous memorial three years after the tragedy took place. It’s nestled in the courtyard of a five-story apartment block in Izium, struck by a missile during the first days of Russia’s invasion. An aerial bomb—a FAB-500 with a time-delay detonator—tore through the building’s center, as if ripping out its heart; the bomb shelter had been located in the basement, right in the middle. Human Rights Watch reported later that a large shell split the building in two and left a crater at least fifteen meters wide. People were buried under a mass of stone and bricks. They lay there, calling for help, until the cries fell silent. Human Rights Watch identified forty-four of them, but mentioned that there were more. Other sources published information about fifty-nine lives lost. Since then, nothing here has changed. On the top floors, the intimate layers of daily life remain exposed—closets filled with clothes, books, and personal belongings. The tragedy here stands still. Frozen in time. Three years on.
Near the green bushes are flowers and photographs, bleached by years of sunlight. The portraits have faded; now only white shapes remain, framed and silent. My gaze lingers on them. These damaged photographs become metaphors for recent history—a history that is already slipping from memory, a story disappearing before our eyes. Time arrives like a quiet beast, visiting the site of disaster, and gently, with the soft warmth of the sun, begins erasing memory—layer by layer—until it takes everything.
It may seem that trauma fades with the image. But no—it does not vanish. On these pale surfaces, the face of war emerges.
We often speak of shining a light on things to reveal them. But here, light itself—like in the poetry of Paul Celan—carries force and cruelty. This light beating down on the photo is a scream turned into silence, a monument swallowed by landscape, a wound coexisting with life that stubbornly carries on. Day after day.
I look at this damaged portrait and wonder: Why do images fade? Compared to 2022, there are fewer posts on social media, fewer reports, articles, and essays. The once-intense attention to every photo has disappeared. The flood of images in our media feeds has ebbed. It feels like people have become used to daily tragedies. Daily madness.
I look at the photograph again, wondering who these people were. But the white blur now lets me imagine any face in that frame. And that is the most frightening part.
In these years of full-scale invasion, many of my colleagues have observed how war photography has changed. Often, it is simply a portrait—a face looking into the camera. These are soldiers, yes—but more often artists, cultural figures, writers, musicians, passersby. Their eyes carry different emotions, yet frequently there is a shared weight, a quiet fatigue. But each of them bears witness. Despite everything, they testify to life. As Ukrainian curator Anna-Maria Kucherenko has noted, the portrait becomes a gesture of love.
These temporary, makeshift memorials, which appear in the wake of tragedy, were likely never meant to endure for decades. They are urgent gestures of grief, attempts to ease the pain in the here and now. To show love—here, now—to those no longer with us. One day, these shrines will be removed. Something new may take their place—a new monument, perhaps, or another apartment block. But what will become of the photographs? Will anyone want them? Will someone be able to restore them?
Susan Sontag once wrote that we remember the world through photographs. But what about the images that fade? Have the last three years marked a kind of invisible line, difficult to cross—or maybe there’s a longing now to leap over what once seemed unthinkable? How do we carry the constant trauma embedded in images? And finally: What will we remember, what stories will we tell—and what will become of our memory, so fragile in the face of circumstance?
