At the time of writing, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 12 journalists and media workers have been killed in Ukraine since the Russian led invasion on 24th February. For many, the war is only a cheap flight or drive away. Experienced photographers are following a trodden path and novice photographers have the opportunity to wet their boots. With little opportunity to embed with the military and unpredictable nature of the conflict, what are the daily challenges, how are photographers being treated, are they being targeted and is their photography being used for propaganda?
Jay Davies (JD) is Director of Photography at Getty Images (GI) overseeing news coverage in Europe, Middle East and Africa. GI is primarily a news agency that gathers pictures and sells them to subscribing news organisations, newspapers, magazines and and television broadcasters. Jay manages seven news photographers and can draw on several dozen other photographers from the sports and entertainment divisions if necessary. With the staff photographers spread thinly, freelancers also provide a crucial contribution.
JD ‘In the years prior to the invasion where the conflict in the Donbas was somewhat of a cold war, we worked with a freelance photographer based in Kyiv and a handful of others from time to time. We periodically cover news in the Ukraine beyond just the conflict, Zelensky’s election and campaign for the presidency was newsworthy. We had our freelancer there covering different parts of that campaign and also taking periodic trips out to the front-line areas near the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk. We stepped up the tempo when there were fears that Russia was looking to escalate in some way at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022. At that time we reached out to other freelancers that are not based in Ukraine who we’ve worked with before who started going to the country with more frequency so we periodically put them on assignment and then in January 2022 we sent one then another of our staffers to Kyiv. We had photographers who raised their hand very vigorously, I would say the majority of them, there were some that were not very comfortable with it or their families were not comfortable with it because it was not something they’d routinely done. We have photographers who went to Ukraine before during peacetime but this is a different matter.’
Leon Neal (LN), a staff member on the GI editorial team, was assigned to Ukraine several months into the conflict arriving shortly after a holiday in Mexico.
LN ‘I travelled to Ukraine with a handful of notes of ideas to consider, plus a bunch of screen-grabs in my phone of interesting stories and photographs that I’d seen online. The GI team was spread out across Ukraine with different cities or regions to cover. I was assigned to concentrate on the gateway to Ukraine, Lviv.’
While international news interest in Lviv was waning, Leon grafted for interesting stories he thought would capture the attention of GI core markets.
LN ‘One of the biggest challenges for me in Ukraine was identifying and documenting features and ideas that had previously gone unreported. As the fighting had moved towards the South East, many media teams had moved with it, leaving Lviv behind. I wanted to dig into the story of Lviv and show what was happening. As the nearest major city to a popular crossing point, Lviv had become a hub for refugees fleeing the Russian invasion and every day saw more people passing through on their way out of the country. The other challenge was that of witnessing so much grief and unhappiness. As the wartime rules prevented men aged between 18-60 from leaving the country, the station became a daily backdrop for the heartbreaking view of families being torn apart. I soon came to recognise the look on the faces of men walking away from the coaches, after saying goodbye to their wives and children, as they battled to hide their emotions until out of view.’
JD ‘Leon was a good example of a staff wire photographer just how industrious you have to be. Our photographers are both reporter and photographer and they’re operating with guidance from me but with a whole lot of autonomy.’
LN ‘I covered everything from evacuated bears in a sanctuary to coffin makers, the race to move gallery artworks into safe storage to children drama performed in air raid shelters. It really allowed me to push as far as I could into a story and the resulting publications around the world showed that I managed that successfully.’
Freelance photographer JB Russell’s first serious attempt at reportage photography was in Russia and Ukraine just after the fall of the Berlin wall. He borrowed money from his grandmother and took a ferry from Stockholm to Helsinki then a train to Moscow. 31 years later, after a career that has sent him around the world, he knew he had to return to Ukraine.
JB ‘It was one of the first major news events post COVID. I was moved by the outrageousness and in-justness of the situation, the historical significance, it’s a huge story worldwide with repercussions and it’s what I do. I was in Paris and unable to leave straight away as I was doing a commercial job. As soon as I could I went. It was close, it was easy. I didn’t have to fly to the other side of the world and spend £1000 on a plane ticket. I flew to Krakow, Poland and was there in a couple of hours, it cost around €70. I rented a car in case I had to be mobile and drove to the border. The refugee crisis was my first stop and spent 4-5 days at the train station and border posts. I didn’t have a fixer, it was pretty straightforward. That situation was extraordinary, I’ve never seen anything like it. It was all volunteers managing a constant flow of primarily women, children and the elderly fleeing the country. I photographed that, it was bitterly cold. I found a little hotel in town. I think I got in early enough. Afterwards it became difficult to find a place to stay, some refugees were taking up hotels, also the media was coming in. For the rest of the trip the biggest logistical challenge was finding a place to sleep for the night.’
JB left for Ukraine without the proactive cloak of a staff position or assignment but trusted his instincts. Before leaving he reached out to previous clients and informed his agency PANOS of his plans. Already being on the ground proved advantageous.
JB ‘Before, a client would fly me out on assignment but now, particularly in the press, no one has money any more so they might prioritise finding somebody who is already there rather than flying somebody out from London, Paris or New York. I got an assignment via PANOS for OXAM so I stayed four extra days. Then I got on the train and went to Lviv for a few days. There were a lot of funerals happening, it was the hub for humanitarian mobilisation, food and medicines coming in and being distributed around the country and hub for refugees leaving the country. Then I got on the train and went to Kyiv. I got there just after two journalists were killed and the situation became so dangerous and difficult even the evacuation stopped, the Ukrainian military couldn’t continue as they were being targeted. Kyiv was being bombed every day, civilian apartments and residential complexes were being hit by missiles. I photographed that. Kyiv was a city on war footing, everything was shut down, the streets were empty, checkpoints every few hundred metres, barricades at every intersection.’
LN ‘Air alerts came regularly in Lviv, sometimes up to five or six times a day. When out and about, it would involve either finding a tunnel or shelter to photograph those taking cover, or continuing to walk the streets, looking for images to show those who refused to have their routine changed by the threat of missile strikes. Alerts that came in the night proved more disruptive with my mobile app producing a siren, followed closely by the air raid sirens in the street, followed by the receptionist broadcasting through the speaker in my room, telling everyone to head to the shelter. After weeks of these 3am wake-up calls, it became a little tiring. Around the weekend of the Russian Victory Day celebrations, tensions were very high in Lviv with reports of major airstrikes due to take place on military and civilian targets throughout the city. Air alerts became more frequent as the date approached and I must admit that my nerves were on edge for the three days around May 9th. Thankfully, in the end, nothing came of the threats.’
JD ‘The biggest challenge in the first days of the war was the kinetic nature of it. In the months since, the war has consolidated around a certain geography, things are in some ways a little more predictable than the first month and a half. It’s not like going and visiting a very well established front line, everything was changing on an hour to hour basis in a lot of cases. You go into a neighbourhood and you’re told by a Ukrainian soldier at a checkpoint this is a safe route to travel, Russian forces are over there and then on your way out the Russian tanks have moved and told you should stay where you are. That was the biggest challenge in the first few months of the war. The fluidity of it and trying to maintain some operational security in what was a really dynamic environment.’
JD ‘A lot of wars that GI have covered have been ones in which the US military is a participant and we have often covered it from in the context of an embed also we’ve covered it from the perspective and point of access of the dominant military actor where that factors into our safety and comfort level. As dangerous as some environments have been where our photographers have worked in Iraq or Afghanistan, it’s often been with the US military. In the first weeks of the war in Ukraine, Russia was the larger military power and that changed the equation for how photographers can navigate a conflict and seek to embed with forces. That said, it’s not like we had a lot of opportunities to embed with Ukrainian forces for our organisation as we didn’t have a full time presence in Ukraine in recent years. We also don’t have those relationships, a very small number of photographers in the first days of the war had the relationship to get alongside a Ukrainian military unit where you saw them moving around town with them. It was a very fluid environment with no official access necessarily even though we all had military accreditations.’
propaganda
JB ‘It was one of those conflicts that was accessible. The foreign press in general were welcomed and appreciated because the Ukrainians understood all wars are information wars. I found among the people and refugees they were very conscious of Russian propaganda. Some were quite wary about being photographed, not because they were afraid to have their picture taken, but afraid that if it was published somewhere out on the internet the Russian would use them and twist them around for propaganda. The Ukrainian population were attuned to the potential of propaganda and what Russia was doing and their image being used for the benefit of Russia. It’s hard to monitor if someone screenshots your picture on the internet and uses them for something in Russia. There’s processes you can do to follow up on that but it’s long and tedious and difficult to do. We’ve seen how Zelensky has been incredibly deft at using the media in communicating not only to rally and unify the country against attack but also to solicit help and support from abroad and getting their story out there. It’s not pure propaganda, it’s not a Trump-like alternate reality. Like in any war, they don’t report how many casualties are Ukrainians, trying to keep people's morale up. They re using the information for their own interests and purposes of course’
LN ‘One of the biggest shocks for me was just how open people were to being photographed. As the UK becomes more and more restrictive on when and where you can photograph and the public trust in news photographers continues to decline, it was such a relief to work in a country that trusts photographers and media to be doing their job. For my first few days, I was massively overcautious in my approach until I realised how relaxed the public are about being photographed. It made my job much easier to concentrate on making photographs and not battling to get permission to work. From a photography point of view, I was reminded to be braver with my photography. On day one I was carrying three camera bodies, with the wide, mid and long zooms, plus a belt pack with assorted other primes. By day three, I was down to two bodies, a 24mm and a 50mm. That forced me to get closer to the story and my images improved dramatically through that.’
JD ‘GI don’t have a dedicated team monitoring the web for misuse of images for propaganda, but it's something all editorial staff and contributing photographers are alert to and address these instances as and when they arise.’
RO ’You’ve got your key people who are in the moment and know how to work those situations. Properly experienced photographers right on the front line getting images but also know when not to get the images. A lot of submissions seem to be coming over from people I haven’t heard of before, the aftermath as opposed to the front line. Even though they’re over there to document it they’re not really dipping their toes in as much as the professionals who have the experience and know where to go and have the proper network and contacts. A lot of the images I’m getting are post conflict and after the event, burnt out tanks in the street, destroyed structures and war crimes where they’ve been going through the villages after. There seems to be a lot of that, everyone seems to have gone over to the areas where it supposedly happened and taken pictures of bodies in peoples back gardens and mass graves. I think there’s definitely a divide. I can tell who had the experience of being a conflict photographer working in hostile environments and the people doing it for the first time around. I have mixed feelings on photographers out there shooting it, a massive majority are not trained professional combat photographers and have never been in hostile situations but have flooded there to christen themselves in the field of war photography, which not only makes it dangerous for them, but for other professional photographers, medics etc.’
RO ‘The Times and Sunday Times newspapers have staff photographers in Ukraine. When you’re commissioning them you’re responsible for them. Anything that happens to them you’ve got a duty of care. If they’re injured you have to take the appropriate steps. Security wise you have to make sure they’re in a safe place. The types of photographers The Times commission for those kinds of assignments would have to go through hostile environment training and have good knowledge to deal with those situations down to knowing how to tie a tourniquet. The company has a history of these kinds of conflicts and to make sure they can be as safe as possible.’
A photographer or journalist can only see the situation through the lens of their own perspective, culture and experience. The idea of journalistic neutrality is false, nobody is completely objective and no single journalist can tell all sides and facets of the story. What’s important to those I spoke to is to try and report from Ukraine as honestly as they can and add their visual chapter to this extraordinary passage of global history.
JB ‘Truth is a relative word too, what is the truth? If I’m moved by something personally or there’s a human story, an emotional aspect about it I think it’s ok to do that. To show a certain side of a situation. You have to be honest the way you’re doing it and not pretend to be neutral.’
Leon returned from Ukraine Working just under one month and found himself fenced off in a photographers pen covering the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations: IG @leonnealphoto www.leonneal.com
JB returned to Ukraine and decided to crowdfund to continue reporting on the situation: IG @jbrussell www.jbrussellimages.com
A version of this article first appeared in Amateur Photographer magazine
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