Ukraine - Simon Maddison LRPS

from RPS The Decisive Moment - Edition 25 - September 2022

by Documentary Group, Royal Photographic Society

Documentary FRPS Panel - Simon Street FRPS

I visited the Ukraine in the Spring of 2019, a pretty standard tourist trip with the highlight being two days at Chernobyl. We started in Kyiv, written as Kiev in our tour notes. A walk through Independence Square where the Maidan Revolution took place in 2014. There I was given a piece of blue and yellow ribbon which I tied to my camera without much thought. Little did I know that three years later this symbol of resistance to Russian aggression would be everywhere. Then past the onion domed Saint Sophia Cathedral stopping to photograph young women wearing Russian colours in front of a statue to a Ukrainian Cossack hero, nothing remarkable about that. Then down the long cobbled Saint Andrew’s Descent with its stalls - one selling Putin toilet paper just seems like a bit of fun. At another, old cameras and Russian posters seem quaint, and a bookseller offers volumes on Stalin. I reach Arsenalna, the deepest underground station in the world, where a couple kiss on the escalator with no thought that it would soon be used as a bomb shelter.

My destination was the Museum of the Great Patriotic War built to honour the heroes of World War 2 when the Ukraine, as part of the then Soviet Union, fought Nazi Germany. Along the walk, ending at the huge Mother Motherland statue, were tanks and guns dating from both the 2WW and of more recent vintage. It’s a Saturday and children have fun and are playing on the military equipment and their parents take photos of them. I do too. At the Memorial, just before the statue, a young boy is the latest to polish the bronze of the submachine gun in the gigantic frieze and young girls use it as a background for a photo session. I don’t put my photos up on my Flickr site as they seem pretty standard.

Now tragically my images, particularly of the children, have a new and I find poignant meaning. A record of innocent play and exploration, typical of so many children’s games - playing soldiers. Children playing on the remnants of past wars themselves become a history of past times. Where are the children and their parents now? How much of their homes and city will remain if they are ever to return? We shall almost certainly see (if you haven’t already) images of Ukrainian children playing on burnt out tanks and guns, a testimony to a kind of “play/life goes on”, as in images of the bomb sites of London.

My images have no great significance but show a recent time quickly gone and how changing events give them a new meaning.

Simon’s Flickr site and his Ukrainian albums can be found at: www.flickr.com/photos/simonmaddison/sets