Photojournalism in Ukraine

What’s it like to be behind the lens in a warzone? Honey Jane Wyatt and Megan Warren-Lister report

“You really experience such heightened emotions when you’re working in a warzone,” says photojournalist Ed Ram. While the job requires him to remain somewhat impartial, he deals with his internal confict by remaining dedicated to capturing his subjects’ stories. “If we don’t try to document what’s going on, it happens in the darkness,” he explains. It becomes clear that this sense of duty is one that’s shared by fellow photojournalist Heathcliff O’Malley, as the pair refects on the challenges of capturing the confict in Ukraine since it started last year.

Walking around Kyiv in the dusky evening light, coffee shops, bars, and restaurants are still open. It might be bustling with people now, but the city’s mandatory curfew will render the streets empty in a few hours’ time.

“Obviously there’s a war going on and people are having their lives turned upside down, but everyone’s walking around. It’s still a buzzing capital city,” says Ram, who has been in the country on assignments since Christmas Day.

Having worked across Ukraine intermittently since the war broke out – and fresh off an overnight sleeper train from rural battlegrounds in the east as we speak –Ram is aware of the deceptiveness of Kyiv’s apparent normality. This sense of duality recurs in other forms: for Ram and O’Malley, navigating journalism in a warzone is a task itself made up of constant conficts.

With 19,000 Ukrainian civilian casualties since the start of the war (according to data from the High Commissioner of Human Rights published in February 2023), reporting the atrocities of the confict is an inevitable part of the job. But in addition to the tragedy, the pair try to capture other elements of life in Ukraine. Reporting in an engaging, sensitive, and objective way may be an ongoing challenge, but O’Malley and Ram’s approaches have been refned through years of working in hostile environments.

O’Malley, who has worked for the Telegraph for more than 25 years, describes how quickly it became apparent that the confict in Ukraine was unlike any he’d covered before.

In September 2001, O’Malley was in New York photographing fashion week during the attack on the World Trade Centre and subsequently covered the War on Terror and the Yemeni civil war, among others. He describes the Russian attack against Ukraine as an ‘existential war’, more akin to WWII than other conficts he’s covered. “If we stop supporting Ukraine it will collapse,” explains O’Malley, which makes it diffcult for him to be objective. Ram, who has covered the Ukrainian war for outlets such as the BBC, the Guardian and the Washington Post, agrees that this particular confict is extraordinary. Whilst he’s spent time in other warzones (recently, Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado confict), the war in Ukraine has made him question that war should be avoided at all costs. “It seems like the morally right thing to do is supply weapons to Ukraine, because what would be the consequences otherwise?” he asks, contemplating the extensive loss of life Ukraine has faced.

Politics aside, both O’Malley and Ram recognise that their role is to capture what’s going on without bias. “You need images coming from journalists to give an objective understanding,” Ram explains. Since March last year, data from Google Trends show that searches for the term ‘Ukraine war’ have fallen almost threefold. For Ram, the dropoff in engagement is a problem, but “it’s a challenge that journalists have to fght,” he says, adding, “if you’re not engaging audiences around something important, you’re not doing your job.”

As photojournalists, they battle the social media content that juxtaposes benign images with horrifc ones, contributing to a general sense of public news fatigue. Overcoming this requires creative storytelling, which, Ram explains, entails looking at the different ways the war impacts people. In an effort to capture humanity, Kenyan-based Ram recently worked with The Washington Post on a portrait project of Ukrainian citizens, exploring their feelings one year from the start of the war.

When they’re working on particularly tragic stories, both Ram and O’Malley feel responsible for capturing the injustices the people they meet face. Unfortunately, not all can be documented, especially when with a publication’s agenda and deadlines in mind.

O’Malley describes the decision-making process for what stories to pursue: “It might sound crass, but as a journalist you’re forced to decide when a good enough time to go back is, so that you can tell the stories newspapers are most likely to want to print.” Most often, this happens during periods with the most confict. “There’s no point in being somewhere and not getting the story used,” he says, which is a fact most journalists will have to come to terms with in their careers. But you don’t want to ask people to relive traumatic situations and waste their time if the story isn’t going to end up being published.

This requires judgement calls about what to photograph. Ram was recently invited to attend a funeral in Pavlohrad, where a senior soldier who died fghting for Ukraine in the Donetsk region was being buried in an open casket. Initial wariness about capturing the scene soon gave way to a broader sense of duty. Describing his decision to take photographs of the 42-year-old’s face as he was laid to rest in his casket, Ram explains: “It’s important we show these sorts of things because if we don’t show blood and death, there’s a danger of people not understanding what a war is about.”

Witnessing the devastating impact of the confict makes objectivity diffcult. Ram says that with the Ukranian confict, the fact that there’s a “clear aggressor”, combined with the “unprovoked” nature of the invasion makes it “quite hard to remain neutral and objective.” O’Malley says: “You try to be, but there’s so obviously a right and a wrong. It doesn’t mean that I’m there shooting propaganda, but you do take a side.”

For Ram too, whilst objectivity is the ideal, in practice, it’s diffcult. “By virtue of being in Ukraine and reporting from here, it’s going to be an unbalanced report,” he explains, adding that the amicable relationship between soldiers and journalists can alter one’s perspective. Though it can be an ongoing struggle, “just because you become attached to the story, doesn’t mean that you can’t be objective,” says O’Malley, who explains that he would never stage or direct the people he photographs to make them appear more heroic.

The human impact of confict is a key driver for Ram’s work. “You get to see people in a very raw state,” he says. In Kherson, O’Malley came across Andriy, Valeria, and their father, Alexander, on the platform of a railway station (pictured on page 58-59), where they were escaping the city after their neighbour’s home was shelled during artillery barrages by Russian forces. Photographing people in such vulnerable situations, however, means balancing empathy with sources, meeting professional obligations, and protecting his own mental health. “I can’t speak for all photographers, but I fnd that really hard to do,” Ram explains. On one occasion in Kharkiv, this balance was brought sharply into focus. Invited into a family’s home, Ram was speaking to a child when he asked where their mother was. The child’s father called Ram into the hallway and explained that his wife was recently shot dead, though the son had not yet been made aware. “That was particularly striking – to be hanging out with this young boy who didn’t know his mum had died,” he says. But it’s these kinds of stories that fuel his journalistic sense of responsibility. “That’s what you’re there for, to get the most powerful stories to highlight the injustice of what’s going on.”

This balancing act between empathy and professional duty also applies to asking for consent. “The fact that you’re raising a camera could change the way somebody behaves,” O’Malley says. The fast pace of journalism in a warzone means that asking for consent is rarely possible. “You can’t go around asking everyone, ‘Can I take a photo of you?’ because then the moment’s gone,” says Ram. O’Malley agrees: if you had to ask every time, “there just wouldn’t be any journalism”. Refecting on times when he has, he says, “I shouldn’t have asked because they probably would have just let me.” Still, he veers on the side of caution and has often missed photos because he doesn’t want to disturb an intimate moment by asking.

If taking a photo is met with distress, Ram says he will always oblige with any deletion requests, and in reality, they’re a rarity. “It’s not like you’re hiding behind a bush, taking a photo and then running off,” he explains. His camera means his subjects are nearly always aware of his role and mostly happy to have their stories shared, a sentiment that O’Malley echoes. “On the whole people are very kind, and in some ways grateful,” he explains. “They feel that we’re there for a reason, and it’s the right reason”.

While you might expect people going through tragedy to be wary of journalists at the scene, this is not the case in Ukraine. Scattered around Kyiv are posters expressing gratitude for journalists covering the war, O’Malley recalls.

‘Thank you journalists, your voices are weapons of the country,’ the posters read. Ram has also found that most citizens understand the media’s interest, and beyond this, “actively want the story to be covered”. Even in those moments that feel intrusive to ask to photograph, people are willing to have their stories documented. While in Kherson, O’Malley came across a son crying on his father’s shoulder as they said goodbye. Understanding this was a “deeply personal moment,” O’Malley asked them for their consent to be photographed, and they agreed.

Despite the fervour to tell the stories of civilians, after O’Malley’s previous monthlong trip, he’s not in any rush to go back.

On the road for weeks at a time with the same people can be intense, especially when the hunt for stories is so turbulent. While in Kharkiv, he and his team heard that Kherson was about to fall and travelled to be nearby. Another time, the team set off specifcally to Kryvyi Rih, a mining and steel town, after hearing that mining trucks were blocking roads from encroaching Russian forces.

Finding time to decompress is, understandably, an important aspect of the job. For Ram, who frequently travels up to 10km away from the military frontline on day trips, recharging his batteries – both those of his beloved Canon R5 and his own – is the only way he feels ready to do it again the next day. “It’s important to be slightly – I wouldn’t say disconnected – but know how to unplug,” explains Ram.

O’Malley agrees that switching off to some degree is essential. There are often air raid alarms going off, sometimes for no reason and others to warn of shellings nearby, so you have to condition yourself to ignore them, he explains. “If you get out of bed every time an alarm goes off, you won’t get any sleep at all and then you won’t be able to function.” Understandably, they have internalised what to do in order to survive, both mentally and physically.

Because being in a warzone takes its toll, they don’t stay in Ukraine for longer than necessary. “It takes a while to adjust when you come home. Even though you come home, you probably don’t mentally come home for another week or so,” says O’Malley. “Once you go, you become invested in it, you feel attached to it. You want to go back and it does feel personal,” he explains. Whilst journalists can enter and exit the country as they please, Ukrainian men can’t leave the country at all, which, for O’Malley, is hard to think about. For this reason, he says, it’s civilians’ stories that deserve to be told, not theirs.

Reporting must continue despite diminishing public interest, says Ram. “You need to keep telling the story, even if it’s not as sexy.” But maintaining engagement is just one of many daily concerns and navigating warzone photography is about more than fnding the best shot. Although the complex decisions underlying their work are often concealed, for Ram, this refects the paradox of their photojournalism. “A photograph kind of says everything and nothing – you don’t know what’s happening around it, or what happened next, or before.”

First page: A soldier stands by as a 122mm missile is launched from a Mitsubishi truck during a Ukrainian recon mission targeting a makeshift Russian base on the Dnieper’s west bank, as they move towards the city of Kherson. Image by Ed Ram

Previous page: Andriy, Valeria, and their father Alexander at Kherson Railway station waiting for the evacuation train to leave for Kyiv after eight months of Russian occupation. Image by Heathcliff O’Malley.

Top right: Max (right) who commands a unit of 54 men, helps a fellow soldier operate a reconnaissance drone that will fy 1.5km high and assess the locations of Russian troops and hardware. Image by Ed Ram.

Middle right: In the ruins of a former asphalt factory 25km outside of Kyiv, reservists of the 130th Territorial Defence Battalion are trained by an NGO. Some carry their personal weapons whilse others make do with sticks or wooden cutouts of an assault rife. Image by Heathcliff O’Malley.

Below right: A destroyed BMP 2 at a former Russian base outside of Izium. Image by Heathcliff O’Malley.

Below left: Army chaplain and veteran Father Konstantin performs a burial service for Dimirtri Khomenko who was killed by a sniper’s bullet near Severodonetsk in the Krasnopilske cemetary, Dnipro, eastern Ukraine. Image by Heathcliff O’Malley.