Oleksandr Glyadyelov’s Ukraine: Modes of Resistance

Black & White: When did photography start for you?

Oleksandr Glyadyelov: Like many families, we had a camera to take family pictures. My father, who was a military officer, had a Russian-made Leica replica, the Zorki 4. I remember the magic of the red light and my father in the kitchen with a piece of white paper that would turn into a print. I was curious: “What’s happening?” Later, as a student, I would go trekking in the mountains. If you travel, you love to record what you’re seeing. So I started shooting Orwochrom, an East German slide film, and black-and-white film. That was the entry point for me into serious photography. But I began to realize that the thing I really admired was to go on the streets to explore the reality out there, with and without people. Street landscapes.

BW: With that approach you’ve documented so much of the recent history of Ukraine.

OG: You wouldn’t suspect it, but before that I was a lieutenant in the Soviet military from 1980 to 1982. During Soviet times, there was obligatory military service if you studied at the university. I defended my diploma in February 1980. Just before then, at the end of 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Many of the guys from our course were sent there as officers. After graduation, I was a commander for the preparation and launch of one of the four midrange nuclear missiles from an underground silo in Western Ukraine. If I had been ordered, when the rocket was ready for launch, I would have had to enter a code, turn the key, and then on command simultaneously press a red button together with the group commander. We had a special security man in back of us with a pistol in case we didn’t do as ordered.

BW: What did you do after returning to civilian life?

OG: I found a job as an engineer in the field of avionics—Laser Doppler Anemometry and other specialties—at the Institute for Problems of Strength of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine for testing materials in various centers. All these offices had a special technical design bureau, which developed equipment for scientists. I made a commitment that I would bring this development to its fruition. This took seven years, and when the promise was fulfilled, I felt free. I had been photographing all this time, but understood that the conditions in which I worked didn’t give me enough time to develop fully as a photographer. So in 1989 I signed two magic papers. One for vacation, and the other for dismissal.

BW: How did you go about turning your avocation into an occupation?

OG: I soon got an invitation from Ukraine’s most important youth newspaper to be a non-staff photographer, which gave me the opportunity to photograph in the streets and avoid problems. Even though I started actively taking photographs during perestroika, there was still suspicion among typical Soviet people, a kind of spy mania. A document confirming my professional status made it much easier to communicate with such people while taking photographs.

I was already part of a creative photo group called Poglyad (Look). Some of us began to engage in photojournalism. Poglyad photographers, including Efrem Lukatsky, Sergei Supinsky, Oleksandr Lyapin and I, were the first who left a formal profession to become freelancers. We were officially registered through the committee of youth organizations under the Lenin Komsomol Committee of Ukraine, so we got a free room to meet once a week. If you did something during the week, you needed to show it and then get collective feedback. It was really tough, direct feedback and a very creative environment. This was the late 1980s, early 1990s, a time of transition. When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a rebirth of free journalism here.

BW: Early in your career, you covered Chernobyl after the 1986 partial meltdown.

OG: Chernobyl was my first real assignment. I got close to the reactor area one or two times, but for me, the story of Chernobyl wasn’t about the classic shots of the reactors or the red forest, but the exclusion zones with ghosted cities.

During my first assignment, I went to Narodychi in the Zhytomyr Oblast and Poliske in the Kyiv Oblast. They suffered no less there, because after the explosion the radiation cloud swirled over these areas and hot particles fell out of the sky. Some villages were evacuated in the same period as Pripyat and Chernobyl. They were surrounded by barbed wire, while people in the next village living on the other side of a field were growing potatoes as if nothing happened. In 1989, Japanese journalists raised this issue. It got into the press that there were these other affected areas, and the authorities announced a resettlement. These forced evacuations of locals bothered me. I went to those villages and documented families packing up to leave, and later some who eventually came back.

BW: You faced the danger of radiation in Chernobyl and then bullets in Transnistria [a landlocked breakaway state internationally recognized as part of Moldova]. How did that war coverage come about?

OG: In October 1989, I had an assignment from the newspaper Molod Ukrainy to report on three brothers who were farmers in the Ukrainian part of Bessarabia, because it was near the border with Moldova. Before the start of hostilities in Transnistria, events were taking place there that were poorly covered by the Ukrainian media. These farmers had acquaintances in Dubasari, a city in Transnistria. At my request, they took me there, and I lived with one family for a week, getting to know people, taking photos, and trying to understand what was happening.

When the fighting started, people from Dubasari called me and said that war had most likely begun. I went there that same day, March 2, 1992, with two other journalists, an Englishman and a Ukrainian, that had asked me to take them with me. We traveled by train, and one of my Ukrainian farmer friends met us and drove us straight to Dubasari early in the morning.

At that moment, fighting was taking place near the village of Cocieri, close to which was stationed a regiment belonging to Russia’s 14th Army. It was blocked by the militia of this village, which was loyal to the central government of Moldova. The Cossacks—Russian volunteers who supported the Slovak separatists from Transnistria—were sent into this battle. I was allowed to go with them. During the conflict, separatism was strongly tinged with pro-Soviet nostalgia and a desire to be together with Russia. This ideology is now being used by the Russians against the Ukrainians.

The Cossacks started climbing over a 2.5-meter concrete barrier surrounding the perimeter of the regiment’s territory. I ran, took pictures, and that’s when I was shot. Lying wounded in the leg on the combat field on the front lines for 15 minutes was such a pure experience. I understood that there is no media that can convey 100% what war is like. You can try to convey all these emotions that you feel in words, video and photography, but it’s only an approximation.

BW: How were you able to survive the wound without sustaining permanent injury?

OG: They wrapped my leg in bandages, then took me out on a bus with families of the military that was also fired upon to a hospital in Dubasari, where they triaged me. In the morning, a friend came from Kyiv and transported me back home. It took all day. By midnight, I was in a military hospital in Kyiv. The military surgeons were very experienced with treating bullet wounds because of the Afghan war. Later, the local militia told me it was an ambush by two or three Moldavian teenagers with Kalashnikovs. Very brave, and very precise shooting. The militia fought them, lost two men, and killed them. Imagine, living in the Soviet Union, all these people were citizens of the same country. A few months later, they started to kill each other. Why? It was a question for me. That’s why I went there. I wanted to understand.

BW: What happened to the film you shot?

OG: My film was sent to the Associated Press in Moscow. They used two images, which were the very first of that war. They were supposed to return the film to me, but it was lost or stolen. I was in the hospital in Kyiv, and lots of journalist friends came to ask how it was going and to tell my story. One colleague from Nezavisimost, one of the leading daily newspapers, said, “You’re probably tired of everyone coming here and asking you to describe what happened, but could you write down your story and we will publish it?”

The editorial board led by Sethiy Tykhyi was working on a project to launch a new newspaper, and invited me join. That was one of my rare staff jobs in photography. They wanted me to both write and take photographs. I had a column called “Pictures” about photography, describing different iconic shots. One was Eddie Adams’ 1968 photo in Saigon. Another was John Lennon hugging Yoko Ono. Besides Adams and Leibovitz, I wrote about the photographs of Eugene Smith, Diane Arbus, Larry Burrows, Werner Bischof, Elliott Erwitt, Salgado, and others. I had a special pass to the central library here where they had the archives of LIFE magazine dating back to the 1940s, as well as back issues of the excellent Swiss magazine Camera, which was published until the end of 1981. Those were key resources.

BW: It’s great in our profession to get a regular gig which translates as a regular income.

OG: This newspaper lasted from 1992 to 1994. During that time I did photography, worked on brand strategy, wrote taglines, worked as a copywriter, and earned enough to make a living. When I was going somewhere, I gave the key to my apartment to my friend, who lived here while I was absent. He worked for Reuters. When we talked about life, he said, “I saw in your fridge half a loaf of bread and two rolls of film, and I understood that it’s possible to live in this way.” Unfortunately, he committed suicide. I continued working as a documentary photographer.

BW: What photography equipment have you been using to document many of the key moments in Ukraine’s recent history?

OG: Since 1992, I have been photographing with the Leicaflex SL, the second model of Leica reflex cameras. Then, from the fall of 1995, I started using the Leica M6. I now have 28, 35, 50 and 90mm lenses. My favorite lens is the 35mm. I can feel the frame with it and make photos from waist level sometimes. During the Soviet time, we used Soviet film for cinema, a replica of XX, ISO 250 pushed to 400 ISO and developed it in D76. We would buy bulk film and load our canisters by hand. From 1994, I’ve used only good film, Tri-X or Ilford HP5 PLUS.

BW: What’s the concept behind your major exhibition here in Kyiv?

OG: The message of the exhibition is to clarify the reality of our recent history. It’s often said that we got independence for free in Ukraine. The Soviet Union collapsed, and it just fell out of the sky. The images that are presented document the cost of our freedom. On the left side of the entrance is the first protest organized by the Union of Ukrainian Youth. They made a 1990 protest against the conscription of Ukrainian youth to serve in the ranks of the Soviet army. Freedom has a price. For example, a sniper was shooting and I was taking pictures near the Kozatskiy Hotel in Maidan where bodies of victims were being prepared for transport, and some people were saying, “Why are you taking these photos? You cannot do it.” Then I moved to another place on Maidan, near a post office where there were dead bodies of more civilians, and people said, “Please take photographs. You have to shoot it to show everybody. This is the price for our freedom.”

BW: You needed to document it, otherwise the other side might claim it’s not real.

OG: There are some that will claim it never happened. This is nothing new. This is the same way the Second World War began. The Germans attacked a German radio station in Gleiwitz (now Gliwice, Poland) on September 1, 1939, pretending that the Polish did it. And now Russians are flying over Poland, and maybe the next step is that they will attack this hub for weapons for Ukraine.

BW: History all too often repeats itself. What’s the background on your series on street children in Ukraine and Russia?

OG: It started as part of my project on socially disadvantaged children in Ukraine. Then in 2002, Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) invited me as an expert to conduct research on the streets of Moscow as part of a project to help street children there. I was asked to provide a full written report on the situation, not photographs. But I took photos anyway. The main reason which led to these homeless kids was the collapse of the Soviet Union. For a Soviet person, life was as direct as a railway track. It was straight and clear what you were going to do, and the state was going to take care of you. The collapse led to a large number of people falling into alcoholism and other addictions. Some couldn’t manage how to make money in this new world. Most of those children had parents, but they ran away from their families or boarding schools, some because they were facing violence. The problem for the most part is over, because the state and the private sector now know what to do. It was a period of transition. The more time the kids spent on the street, the more difficult it was to reintegrate them into society. So they really needed to be fast on this. There were a lot of pedophiles out there hunting for victims. That was another reason to speed up the efforts to get these boys and girls off the street. I worked on that story from 1996 to 2016. I then documented everything HIV-related from 1997 until 2018.

BW: Your long relationship with Doctors Without Borders also includes a fascinating look behind the bars of former gulags.

OG: I was allowed to go inside post-Soviet prisons, including in Kemerovo, Mariinsk and Novokuznetsk in the Kemerovo Oblast, and an infamous former gulag, Karlag, in Kazakhstan through Doctors Without Borders, because they treat a modern multidrug-resistant tuberculosis in the penal system in former Soviet countries. In Kazakhstan, I was assisted by the international humanitarian organization AIDS Foundation East-West. Working with these organizations has been a magical key. I rarely do color, except on assignments for Doctors Without Borders.

BW: Why did you cover the latest war in black and white and continue shooting analog?

OG: Because firstly, I adore the process of printing. Secondly, I feel more like myself in black and white. When I press the shutter, I see the photo as it should be printed by my hands. Probably how the neurons in my brain work. That’s why there’s no need for contact sheets. At the very beginning, I did [them], then I thought, “What for?” When I look through the lens and produce a negative, I already see the positive. I put the negatives in a print file and write down which frames I want to print. I still print my own work in my apartment with my Leitz enlargers: a Focomat II with a Durst color head and a Focomat V35. For my exhibition, the large prints are done by hand at an excellent lab, Photo Vision. When you enter their lab, it’s like entering Aladdin’s Cave. They use a Durst on rails and project onto a wall to make large prints.

When the full-scale invasion by Russia started, I wanted to fight, but I could not because of my age. All I can do is make photos. I feel ashamed, because the best of our Ukrainian young people are fighting. I know a lot of them: artists, photographers, boys, girls. A few days ago one girl who is fighting with deep strike drones called and asked me to sign a book for her friend, who I had taken pictures of for his mother when he was a teenager. Now he’s fighting in the 108th Separate Assault Battalion, the “Da Vinci Wolves.” Da Vinci was the call sign of the first commander of this famous battalion who died in battle in Bakhmut in 2023.

BW: Your contributions are your photographs, and you were wounded during the siege of Ilovaisk in the Donbas region in 2014.

OG: In 1994, I photographed independently on the front lines of the first Azerbaijani-Armenian war over Karabakh. In 1997, I worked with Doctors Without Borders in Azerbaijan for the first time to show the consequences of this war. There were more than one million displaced people; I documented the condition of their living in big tent camps. I also covered the fighting in Chechnya.

I’ve seen war, and I’ve seen the results. I was lucky it was not in my country. But every time I would come back, I would tell my friends, “They will come to us with a big war.” I saw what the Russians were doing. Then it happened in 2014.

BW: Do you have thoughts on how this latest war will end?

OG: Nobody knows. We have a monster next to us. We see how the West is weak. They have to be strong. That’s the only thing Putin understands. If you have a cancer, you have to go to the hospital right away, not wait for some mystical way of treatment.

Addendum
Special thanks to photographer Julia Kochetova and curators Oleg Sosnov and Tetiana Lysun. See more work from this remarkable photographer’s legacy at instagram.com/glyadyelov, and learn more at ukrainianphotographies.org.