Photo: W. Boling
We must acknowledge and lift up before anything else the courage of the Ukrainian people. They bear their suffering with a grace and a ‘spit in their attacker’s eye’ willpower and strength that has already in a few short/long days rallied the world to their side. Regardless of the final outcome, they have given Putin and his evil crime enterprise a humiliating black eye that - let us pray - will bring down his rogue regime sooner than we might have expected. In their willingness to fight back, they have given the world an unforgettable example of the power of freedom. Especially when it is coupled with courage and grit. And frankly they have shown the world how we should all behave in the face of bullies and autocrats.
At this writing the outcome of the war is uncertain and the likelihood leans toward some form of Russian all out assault on civilians and occupation followed by months or years of insurgency - a bitter process we sadly know all too well. The Russian military is so vast and Putin so brutal, it is difficult to imagine another outcome - and still we hope. This is not a newsletter about politics or war but about art and photography and its dance in the world; a world that regrettably still includes war and human atrocities. I will write here briefly about how the imaging of war can impact war’s outcome in real time and how the narrative and history of it unspools over time. I write from what I saw as a boy watching TV and printed photojournalism during the Vietnam war (it ended when I was 19) and in our many wars since. A short piece here because our eyes, hearts, minds and vibes are best served by witnessing the world changing events happening in Ukraine (and the world’s response to those changes). And I am writing here and not biding my silence because art, writing and that dance I speak of is vital even in the midst of war.
This is our first fully wired war. Please let it be our last. “Fully wired“ in the sense that the number and scope of the social media platforms and the phone cameras and total users has reached a crescendo that is truly global. While it is true that phone cameras and social media were available and deployed during the fighting in the Middle East and Afghanistan and elsewhere it was not to the same degree and not with the same level of participation and sophistication from the attacked. Just as those Vietnam photographs brought the war home to Americans, the many phone videos and photos released into the Twittersphere then picked up and recirculated in media outlets large and small are energizing the world to take action. We are experiencing in real time a virtual panopticon of war.
Images are impacting the outcome of how the Russian invasion is unfolding and what it means, how it will be seen by history and how it will effect our future. I will look here at just a couple of the thousands of examples that are out there now. I have found the news blog DailyKos makes the best use of Twitter sourced image posts, and I go there often to take in their curation and commentary. I recommend it.
As Megan Garber writes in her excellent essay in The Atlantic about the Ukrainian use of imagery, “statecraft is often stagecraft.” And the signal image of the war thus far is the video short performed by Ukrainian President Zelensky. The Zelensky Presidential street selfie will be as remembered and hallowed in the history of war images as the painting of “George Washington Crossing the Delaware,” and it was delivered in real time. It had the impact of an emotional cluster bomb. This remarkable video occurred on the critical second day of the invasion. President Zelensky and his cabinet take to the streets of Kyiv to perform a selfie short - its just over a half a minute, and it shifts the world.
Posted everywhere - credit here to NBC where I grabbed the screen.
President Zalensky and his cabinet crowd together in the dim street light to show the world they are still alive, still on duty, still standing. The nation and the world is called to action as he says ‘here, here, here’ - your president and your cabinet are here to fight with you, here to be vulnerable with you, here to stand with you as we are all under attack. They are together, they are standing in the now dangerous but still beautiful streets of Kyiv, their hometown, their nation’s capital - homespun presidential homies - there to represent. They immediately command our attention and our hearts. And later we know he means it when he says: “I don’t need a ride; I need ammunition.” (And munitions support came pouring forth from all over the world!) Here is the full the video:
This contrasts so brilliantly with our mental image of Putin, bunkered down in his playpen dungeon, sitting at a ridiculously long table, surrounded by his carefully culled thugs, a Gollum like creature of the dank and dark and evil. He holds a nuclear missile to the head of every man, woman and child on planet earth and dares us to intervene. He is a monster.
The second image to take away is a largely verbal and theatrical image. It is linked to this arial view of Snake Island - you can imagine you are in the helicopter with the Russian’s looking at their faces when they receive this reply to their demand to surrender: “Russian Warship, Go Fuck Yourself.” Again, this is such a brief shot across the bow, and yet for each of us in the world it sends a spine stiffening call to act in the face of unbelievable crises and seemingly overwhelming odds. It is a David and Goliath myth making moment driven by a verbal shout out to our imaginations - this is who we humans are - who we have the potential to be. Heroes.
The final image to consider is a simple and beautiful photograph I first saw published in the New York Times last week by the photographer Nanna Heitman ( I screen grabbed these details and will add the full photo when I can track it down).
Detail from photo by Nanna Heitman for NYT
Her photo reveals for me the tragedy that is always there on all sides of war: the conscripted attackers and the attacked. The faces of the young (always so young on the front lines) Russian tank pilots who seem so vulnerable and out of place peeking out from the top of their powerful war machine rolling out on their ‘God only knows what’ assignment into a realm of action that they likely do not grasp at all. And they have been lied to. They seem like very nice people dragged into something. Something cataclysmic that will forever alter their lives, if they survive, as much as it will those they are assigned to kill and subjugate.
I do not have a grand conclusion to draw here from the consideration of these images and all the images of all the wars I have watched play out from Vietnam, the Middle East, around the world and now, yet again, in Europe. But, this much is certain, as the American military learned from their experience in Vietnam, images, verbal and visual, create the ground against which wars and the ending of wars play out. World order and disorder are created as much by the images from which narratives are woven as it is by armaments, politics and technology. Any lasting, well integrated, consolidated and worthwhile victory must include the winning images. Here’s to hoping that as this war grinds to some kind of a stop, the Ukrainians and the free world continue to win the war of images. And we have to pray too that the draconian information barricades and dikes that Putin has created to stop the flow of images into the minds and hearts of Russian people will break loose so that they can witness and share with us the truth of what their dictator and oppressor is unleashing.
This is a global world that we are now fully wired together in. We will all ultimately share the same images. Godspeed to Ukraine and its people. Godspeed to the people of the earth who want to live in peace.
Further detail from photo by Nanna Heitman for NYT