You see what you don’t see. What you couldn’t see from afar. The man dressed as Santa Claus who, crossing a clearing, passes in front of a memorial to the war dead. Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine. It is a photograph that we would call beautiful – an emotional short circuit, a Christmas paradox – but the adjective “beautiful” is incongruous, perhaps unacceptable. Finding the adjectives a hundred of the thousands of images that have arrived in recent months from the fronts of the conflict, finding the words a hundred times has not been easy. Susan Sontag’s timeless questions: how does looking away or keeping it fixed change our relationship with the pain of others? It doesn’t change that pain. And yet we are warned of it; and in the still present risk of addiction, a detail, a colour, a trail of light can awaken us from distraction, from sleep.
You see what you don’t see, you see: a crater in a playground, a father holding the hand of his slain thirteen-year-old son. You see the mutilated man, a teapot among the ammunition. Bodies of Russian soldiers arranged as a scar to compose a z, the symbol of the invasion. Bodies of Ukrainian soldiers piled up in mass graves. Bodies of animals: horses killed along the road in the Hostomil region, geese crossing the road amidst the sound of shelling in the village of Mala Tokmatchka, south of Zaporizhzhia. A parallel story, the war of humans that cruelly involves even non-humans.
One hundred photos are one hundred novels that nobody has written yet. But they are novels that we have a duty to imagine: and the social commentator who dismisses them with impatience, with annoyance, lacks courage. A sort of stuffed Scrooge: he would rather deny the evidence, bet that it is a propaganda staging, rather than admit a trivially and terribly human fact. The luck of not being the woman crying over a loaf of bread, the disoriented boy in the gutted city, the old man dragged in a wheelbarrow. The luck that one’s name does not coincide with that of a semi-living person with a marked body, with the name of a dead person written in capital letters on the wall of a refuge, or on a paper tombstone.
he folder