Against Image Fatigue: On Researching and Curating Photography from Ukraine

Detail of Sasha Kurmaz, Red Horse, 2022–25, ongoing project. Photography, collage, found objects, mixed media. Courtesy of Sasha Kurmaz.

 

Kateryna Filyuk, editor of Researching and Curating Photography from Ukraine: Reflections, Perspectives, Challenges, published by the University of Salford and 89books, opens her essay on contemporary photographic practices with a discussion of Sasha Kurmaz’s series Red Horse (2022–25). Quoting the Images Vevey Prize jury, which awarded the project the Grand Prix in 2023, she highlights its “fragmented, multilayered approach … [that] mirrors the fragmented nature of our reality, especially in the context of war.”1 In Filyuk’s reading, Red Horse becomes a point of departure for exploring how contemporary artists intertwine the personal with the public, and artistic experimentation with documentary practice.

 

This sense of fragmentation and overlapping temporalities also informs the book itself. Composed as a network of perspectives, it brings together voices that map the Ukrainian photographic field from within. The volume attends not only to iconic images and canonical figures that define the history of photography in Ukraine, but also to fragile infrastructures and dispersed archives, to what remains invisible or overlooked. Inevitably, the war emerges as a watershed, transforming both the medium and those who engage with it.

 

The materials in the volume can be roughly divided into three categories. The first includes historical overviews and attempts to trace the trajectories of Ukrainian photography: rethinking periodization, revisiting key figures, restoring lost connections, and reflecting on architectural photography as a hybrid space where propaganda, artistic experimentation, and the documentation of urban history intersect.

 

The second group of texts reflects on photography in the contemporary context of Russia’s military aggression: a renewed focus on documentary practice, fatigue with war images, the erosion of trust in visual evidence, reflections on the ethical limits of representation, and the shifting role of Ukrainian photographers, who, as Oleksandra Osadcha rightly observes, find themselves in the paradoxical position of being both “insiders” and “outsiders” to the catastrophe.

 

The third trajectory brings together fieldwork, curatorial, and archival practices shaped by the urgency of war. Projects such as Odesa Photo Days and the Ukrainian Warchive Initiative show how curatorial work becomes a form of care and solidarity, focused on preserving images, sustaining connections, and keeping Ukrainian photography viable and visible amid dislocation and loss.

 

If multiple contributors to the volume (Kateryna Radchenko and Oleksandra Osadcha) point to the heightened role of documentary photography in Ukraine as one of the defining features of the current moment, the section “The Transformation of Photography During Wartime: Photographic Practices in Ukraine Since February 2022” more clearly illuminates the reasons for this shift. Since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, documentary photography in Ukraine has functioned not merely as a genre but as a crucial civic practice: a means of countering disinformation, bearing witness, and preserving lived experience.

 

Sasha Kurmaz, Red Horse, 2022–25, ongoing project. Photography, collage, found objects, mixed media. Courtesy of Sasha Kurmaz.

The transcribed panel discussion “Curating and Researching Photography from Ukraine” shows that not only individual photographers but also small institutions and independent initiatives have been founded or reoriented with the awareness that “Russian narratives were being used to manipulate history and justify the invasion, war crimes” (Emine Ziyatdin).2 These projects were founded with the goal to “counter misinformation” (Max Gorbatskyi),3 as exemplified by Ukrainian Photographies and the Ukrainian Warchive Initiative, presented in the volume alongside the Odesa Photo Days Festival.

Oleksandra Osadcha expands the discussion in her essay “Regarding the Pain of One’s Own: Ukrainian Photographers in Times of War,” observing that Ukrainian photographers operate not only within the realities of an information war but also inside a broader field of historically shaped skepticism toward the image, particularly toward photographs of war and violence. This skepticism is rooted in Western critical thought on photography. Osadcha traces this genealogy of doubt from Theodor Adorno to John Berger, Susan Sontag, Allan Sekula, and Martha Rosler, suggesting, after Bruno Latour, the term “iconoclash” to describe this discourse. Unlike iconoclasm, this discourse is marked by uncertainty: “One is troubled by an action [towards the image] for which there is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive.”4 For Ukrainian artists, this tension translates into a double bind: the need to document the war, engaging in what Asia Bazdyrieva and Svitlana Matviyenko (as cited by Osadcha) call “the labor of witnessing” on the one hand, and the awareness of a historically and theoretically embedded mistrust in photographic testimony on the other.5

Documentary photography is not the only mode through which the experience of war is explored in this volume. Kateryna Radchenko draws attention to the therapeutic dimension of photography, one that extends beyond professional practice to anyone holding a smartphone. She discusses a project by Kateryna Alieksieienko that weaves together portraits, fragments of interviews, and images drawn from the participants’ own phones to convey the experience of fleeing shelled cities, struggling to board evacuation trains, and navigating the disrupted routines of wartime life seen from within. In her analysis of vernacular photographs from the frontline, Radchenko points to the prevalence of self-portraits among soldiers, images that express “an act through which you make yourself feel alive; … an act of self-remembrance.”6

Questions regarding the ethics of representation are a central thread throughout the volume. In the contributions by Kateryna Radchenko and Kateryna lakovlenko, they take on particular urgency. Radchenko speaks of a growing fatigue with war imagery: “We hear more and more often that people are tired of seeing destroyed houses or people who have been killed.”7 In an oversaturated visual environment, images of destruction increasingly produce emotional exhaustion and detachment. At the same time, as lakovlenko notes, this response does not necessarily signal a loss of sensitivity. She interprets the circulation of images of violence as “a cry for help,” a gesture that calls for a response yet also reveals the limits of one’s capacity to act: “When you see such images, you have to respond somehow—there is this responsibility around acting on it.” But for most people, “this is too difficult.”8

In Ukraine, questions of photographic ethics are no longer confined to theoretical discourse but have become part of lived experience. As Oleksandra Osadcha observes, the dilemma of photographing the war is shared by everyone who might one day become its subject. In response, some artists seek an ethical distance, a way of speaking about the war without inflicting further pain on those it touches (Oleksandra Osadcha on Chairs, 2022, by Elena Subach).9 Others rethink the temporality of representation, delaying the act of showing until a more appropriate moment, as a gesture of love and care (Kateryna Iakovlenko on Photography from the Future Year, 2023, by Katya Buchatska).10

In the transcription of a panel on current institutional and research practices, Ukrainian curators reflect on a new challenge: how to sustain public attention amid the visual saturation of war imagery. Kateryna Radchenko (Odesa Photo Days Festival) observes that “visual content had lost its immediate impact.” As images of destruction and violence began to lose their affective charge, curators turned to new narrative approaches that connected the experience of war with broader historical and cultural contexts. This perspective resonates with the overall conception of the conference that the book is based on and is reflected in the volume’s historical section.

Roman Pyatkovka, Soviet Photo, 2012. Courtesy of Roman Pyatkovka.

Olena Chervonik reconsiders the Kharkiv School as an early manifestation of Ukrainian postmodernism, expanding the notion of Soviet-era dissent beyond the political to include aesthetic resistance. In contrast, the panel on Iryna Pap (Izvestia’s chief photo correspondent in the Ukrainian SSR from 1957 to 1972) foregrounds issues central to Soviet official photography—the need to reassess the role of women in photojournalism, to analyze recurring tropes of Ukraine’s representation in propaganda imagery, and to confront the paradoxical legacy of Soviet visual culture in today’s Ukraine.

Education and training infrastructures, both formal and informal, emerge throughout the volume as a recurring theme, revealing the crucial role of mediators in shaping the history of Ukrainian photography. Iryna Pap, who became dean of the photojournalism department at the Institute of Journalistic Excellence at the Union of Journalists of Ukraine in 1976, trained a generation that would later define independent Ukraine’s documentary photography. The recently rediscovered link between Pap and one of her students, Viktor Marushchenko, was highlighted in the panel dedicated to his legacy. The discussion portrayed him both as the author of the landmark documentary series Chornobyl and Dreamland Donbas (2003) and as an educator whose photography school, founded in 2004, played a pivotal role in shaping Ukraine’s contemporary photographic field.

The question of the archive, both in artistic and curatorial practices, runs throughout the volume. In the Ukrainian post-Soviet context, marked by weakened institutional structures and the long-standing outflow of archival materials to the former imperial center, the very notion of the archive requires a profound rethinking. Whereas in post-structuralist theory, from Michel Foucault to Allan Sekula, the archive is understood as an apparatus of power, normalization, and selection, for Ukrainian researchers and artists it becomes a space of mnemonic recovery, of reconstructing marginalized histories and restoring lost connections.

In Alex Bykov’s keynote “‘It Wasn’t That Long Ago’: Kyiv in 20th Century Architectural Photography,” the archive appears not as a stable repository but as a ruin to be repaired. Since the collapse of the USSR, “much of the information has been lost, destroyed, or sold off.”11 Materials retrieved from the grey market, scattered publications, propaganda photo albums, and private family archives lay the groundwork for a practice of reconstruction, a kind of archaeology of vision. In these photographs, Bykov identifies a particular gaze of architect-photographers that reveals both the original construction projects, often obscured by later changes, and an ironic, critical view of Soviet society. Ultimately, these archives become “a lens through which to view the Soviet period, providing nuanced and multifaceted perspectives on a time and place that continue to shape contemporary discussions of identity, history, and culture in Ukraine.”12

Another archival impulse underpins current initiatives aimed at preserving the photographic record of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The central question posed by the team behind the Ukrainian Warchive Initiative—“What happens to all their hard drives, to all the digital work [photographers] have produced?”—reflects a very real fear of losing one’s own voice and memory.13 As Kateryna Iakovlenko notes, “If we went back to 2014 … and searched for images from the front line from that time, it would probably be challenging to find the exact image that we wanted … because of the vast amounts of information that is just lost on the internet.”14 These words read as a warning: despite ongoing efforts at collecting, cataloging, and digital archiving, “we don’t know what will be saved after the war.”15 Paradoxically, what has been described as “the most documented” and “the most networked” war in history may also prove to be one of the most difficult to preserve, its vast digital archive already slipping into oblivion.

The book’s strength lies not in constructing a “grand narrative” but in the way it frames current conversations about photography. Alongside analytical essays, it retains the conversational tone of the panels—a deliberate editorial choice that conveys the immediacy and vitality of the discussions. Taken together, these voices present Ukrainian photography not as a finished story but as a field of ongoing reflection on the ethical, mnemonic, and civic dimensions of photographic practice. Rather than yielding to image fatigue, they reclaim the image as a space of resistance, imagination, and care.