‘From normality to madness’ French photographer Antoine d’Agata on capturing the invisible pain of war in Ukraine for Jonathan Littell’s new book
Just before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, French-American writer Jonathan Littell and French photographer Antoine d’Agata traveled to Kyiv’s Babi Yar ravine, where the Nazis carried out one of the Holocaust’s largest massacres in September 1941. Littell and d’Agata’s goal was to document how the site of such enormous tragedy preserves its history and exists in the present day. However, Moscow’s full-scale war forced them to broaden the scope of their project to reflect a reality where war crimes are not just a horrific chapter in Ukraine’s past but a part of its daily life in the present. The resulting book, titled An Inconvenient Place, was published in French in late 2023. Now, Meduza has released its first-ever Russian-language translation. Photographer Antoine d’Agata has also undertaken other assignments in Ukraine, working for The New York Times, Le Monde, and Magnum. He even helped the Ukrainian military in Kharkiv compile a photo archive of deceased Russian soldiers for future exchanges. Meduza spoke with d’Agata about his experiences working in a war-torn country and how he maintains his ability to empathize.
This interview has been lightly edited and abridged for length and clarity.
In your book with Jonathan Littell, you explore memory and forgetting through the story of Babi Yar. How do you go about capturing the invisible?
Babi Yar was just a public park with families walking around and there was nothing to look at, nothing to see. And this is what I found challenging. I don’t consider the function of a photographer as just looking; I think our responsibility is to see beyond what can be seen. It was very challenging to come to Babi Yar and feel like you’re 70 years too late to do anything as a photographer. As you keep going back and back and back, you start understanding the place, you start to have a more precise feeling of the past. And slowly we found a hospital, we found a morgue, we found a psychiatric hospital.
Was there a specific moment at Babi Yar where the past started opening itself up to you?
Maybe in [the Kyiv psychiatric hospital] Pavlivka, because it was historically a very important place. This is where the Germans killed a lot of people. One day before they brought the Jews to Babi Yar, they killed the mental patients from Pavlivka. And also because the place is so big, so dark, and you cross [paths with] so many people who are lost in mental illness. It’s a very practical place to get lost yourself, between present and past, [between] some kind of obscurity and darkness. I remember once I was walking [in Babi Yar park] and it was raining, and I fell in some kind of hole. It was so slippery; I couldn’t get out. It was like if the past was taking me. I felt a kind of panic.
What was the process of working with Jonathan Littell like?
We did a lot of things together. For me, it was a privilege to be with Jonathan because, in a very efficient way, he kept feeding me all this information, perspectives, [and] layers of historical times. And in a way, easily, without any effort, I could absorb all this information and I could stay focused on the photographic connection to the world around me. But the moments where I connected the most with the place itself, of course, were moments when I was alone. Sometimes you need to be alone and you need to be directly, emotionally, and mentally connected to a place.
What was your impression of Ukraine in the first days of the full-scale invasion?
I started to come to Ukraine at least 15 years ago. When you keep traveling [somewhere] all the time, you develop these kinds of invisible links to places. I’m not a war photographer. But after spending so much time in Ukraine and asking so much from people, I felt like it was my duty — not duty, but responsibility — to be there with what was happening. And basically, it was a very unproductive trip. Of course, I got scared, I got nervous. But just being scared was already my way of [showing solidarity with the place].
[What struck me was] how easily a place can go from normality to madness. I saw some dead people, I saw some dead journalists, I saw some empty cities. In Kharkiv, I stayed with a friend of mine. You see devastation, you see destruction. I saw people living not only in the subway, but people living in some kind of basements.
During this trip, I went to the morgue in Kharkiv for the first time. I was not allowed to photograph, but I could see all the dead bodies. I don’t see it as a privilege or a duty. I just think we are all responsible not to be only spectators of the life around us.
It was there that you eventually took a series of photographs of Russian soldiers’ bodies. Ukraine later used these images to organize an exchange.
I think I would not have done it [if I hadn’t been asked]. I mean, I was very angry with the Russians. I think I still am. In the beginning, I was not supposed to keep the pictures. [The Ukrainians] allowed me to keep the pictures because we spent hours together. In the end, I think I never felt so close to Russian soldiers as the ones I was photographing. Because you see people naked in their underwear. They asked me to photograph the tattoos, to photograph what was inside their wallets. You end up being in this very close intimate scene of the dead.
The original photos cannot be published. Most of these bodies had been waiting in the ground for weeks or months before the Ukrainians were able to take them out. Most of them were just like rotting meat. It was just impossible to look at it or to show it.
[So, I turned them into negatives] to give the work a possibility to become some kind of translation of reality or interpretation of reality. I think now, the way they are, you can connect with the expressions, you can connect with the faces. In a way, it reconciled me. Not with Russians. I was very angry with Russians in general. And with Russia in general.
But one by one, [with] each one of these faces, I was looking again at a person. And at least I could start to feel again the humanity of these people. Sometimes [while] still being angry, but at least some kind of dialogue or exchange could happen between this humanity. For me, it is important to get away from statistics, to get away from politics, to get away from words and to go back to the very essence of how poor our basic human life is. How fragile human life is.
In your works, you often combine multiple portraits, scenes, or landscape elements into a single image. Why do you use this technique?
I think out of frustration with classical photography, where usually people [take] a lot of time to make a good picture out of a specific situation. And for me, the horror usually comes from the numbers, you know. I could spend one hour and make the perfect photo of a building. But what I want to show is not just one building. It’s 100, it’s 1,000. So the quantity is a way to measure the absurdity and the horror of the situations.
You arrived in the Kyiv region in May 2022, when the most visible signs of war crimes had already been cleared away.
After working with Babi Yar — being 70 years late, I mean — just being two weeks late isn’t much of a problem. There were enough “bridges” to [the atrocities that had happened there].
The things I see as a photographer, [the graves and places where people were kept,] make me so angry. And what also makes me angry is everyone’s capacity to forget, not to look at it, not to think about it, to go back [to normal]. This capacity we have to live side by side with horrible things and just [accept them]. So, my feelings are much more violent than my pictures.
During your work in Ukraine, you visited psychiatric clinics several times.
It was a strange experience. I mean, firstly because The New York Times sent me [to Pavlivka, where Ukrainian soldiers with PTSD were being treated] without a journalist, so I was alone with a translator. But basically, what was striking was that it was very non-spectacular. It was nothing, just people sitting at a table, playing cards, looking through the window, smoking. I mean, ashtrays with mountains of cigarettes.
But once you start speaking with the people, they just start to [open up] and you understand. I mean, they tell you what they went through. Sometimes, very non-spectacular stories too. I remember this guy who had been waiting somewhere for six months. Nothing was happening. But after six months of nothing, just waiting and being scared and nervous, his brain broke down. Just waiting can be enough to drive someone crazy.
I remember a woman, especially. She was a medic and [she just wanted] to be strong enough to go back [to the front again], you know. And you are just amazed by the courage. But most of the stories were not heroic.
The book mentions how you were detained while on a shoot and banned from taking photographs.
A few things happened, little things, but the most disturbing was, a few days after [The New York Times published the story about the psychiatric hospital], they called to tell me that my press card was suspended. The Ukrainian government took away my accreditation. And I was so shocked because for me, I had no idea I’d been doing something wrong. But they considered the work to be too pessimistic, too dark, not heroic enough. And so, it took me months and months to get my press card back.
Do you now have the opportunity to return to Ukraine?
I have my press card back, and I can go back if I want to go back. But I felt like probably if I went back to Ukraine, I would repeat myself.
I thought that working with the Ukrainian project [“Beyond the Silence,” curated by Kateryna Radchenko] about things happening in the world and putting Ukraine in a larger political context, even with what happened in Israel now, it would be more efficient and more meaningful. I felt I wouldn’t be very useful in Ukraine. So, my reason not to go back is because I’m trying to find new perspectives.
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Interview by Lilia Yapparova