The strangest thing about war is that life goes on. On the front, we fight and we die. But just behind, people continue to come and go, to buy bread, to take the bus. Children play in a sandbox. Others go to the swimming pool. Here, a teenager strums a guitar. There, young people dance at the end of the night. Elsewhere, families celebrate a birthday. Life goes on but, in the eyes, something has changed. There are serious faces and stunned people. There are overflowing morgues and hospitals, gutted buildings, shattered lives. Above all, there is courage, a lot of courage, because every day we must live and live again.
UKRAINE. November 2022. A building damaged by the blast of a Russian strike in a neighborhood southwest of Kherson, Ukraine, on November 30.
/ © Chloé Sharrock/MYOP
Fragments 02-2002/02-2023 (Manuella Éditions) is therefore a book about life in times of war, a variation of love in the time of cholera. With extreme sensitivity, six photographers from the MYOP agency tell the story, not of the battles on the front lines, but of the impact of this same fracas on daily life. The paradox is powerful: we understand war better far from the front. Photographed at point blank range – at 35 or 50 millimeters – these fragments of lives, struck by fragments of shells, show us the true face of Russian aggression and its monstrous consequences.
Timor, 9, raises his fist to greet passing soldiers, shouting: “Glory to Ukraine” or “Russians are pigs” in Druzhkivka, Donbass, Ukraine, June 4, 2022.
/ © Adrienne SurSurprising /MYOP
“To properly tell what is happening at the rear, you must first have been to the front, heard the sound of the cannon, breathed in the smell of combat,” testifies Guillaume Binet, one of the six photographers and co-founder of the MYOP agency which covered several conflicts, notably in Africa, and was in Ukraine, with other colleagues from the agency, before February 24, 2022. Founded in 2005, MYOP (My Eyes, Patient Objects; four words taken from a poem by Paul Éluard) brings together 22 French photographers who demonstrate with force and finesse that there still does indeed exist a “French touch” in photojournalism – and in photography itself.
UKRAINE. Kharkov. Residents took refuge in the city’s metro to escape the bombings. April 4, 2022.
/ © Chloé Sharrock/MYOP
Of course, unlike cameramen, photographers do not reproduce sounds, screams, tears, explosions. But they capture fragments of history, all over the country. “A good photo is one which contains several levels of information, believes Guillaume Binet. It is the one on which we stop for a moment; which provokes a minimum of reflection and from which the viewer emerges a little richer than when he had entered it,” he continues. This is precisely what happens with the 240 images of Fragmentsan intense and essential work which informs us in depth about Ukraine – and whose profits are donated to a Ukrainian association helping victim families.
UKRAINE. Kharkiv Oblast. September 25-28, 2022. Report in the Kharkiv Oblast following the counter-offensive led by the Ukrainian army in September 2022. City of Izioum liberated on September 11, 22. View of the city from the Main Police Station of the city. It was occupied and used as a prison by the Russian army and reportedly by cruel separatist forces from Donbass. In this place the inhabitants of the city suspected of having remained loyal to Ukraine were locked up, mishandled, sometimes tortured and raped.
/ © Guillaume Binet/MYOP
Fragments is also a carefully considered “concept album”, in collaboration with the graphic designers of the ABM Studio agency. Its white cover, in three panels, lifts like a shroud. Inside, empty spaces evoke missing images, “fragments” of war that photographers were unable to capture. And it is a “silent” book, so as not to distract the viewer’s gaze, the photo captions are relegated to the end of the book. Aesthetic but not mannered, this “Fragment” touches our hearts.
Mykola and her sister Irina cry and hug each other, while their father sits, during the funeral of two brothers, Dmytro, 36, and Yevheniy, 30, who were killed by the Russians, in Dovzhyk, Ukraine on April 21, 2022.
/ © Adrienne Surprenant/MYOP
Ukraine Fragments 02-2002/02-2023 (Manuella Éditions)
300 color photographs 256 pages, €35. Photographs by Guillaume Binet, Laurence Geai, Zen Lefort, Chloé Sharrock, Michel Slomka, Adrienne Surprenant.
Text by Oleksandr Mykhed.
As all of the book’s partners waive their remuneration, all funds from the sale are donated to the Ukrainian association NGO YES. Based in Zaporizhia, it provides food, medical and clothing aid to vulnerable populations as well as those displaced by war in this region of the east of the country.