Story 144: Yana Kononova

What is your backstory?

I was born in the Caspian Sea on the Pirallakhi island, which is the place of oil extracted, where in ancient times Zoroastrians worshipped a fire. During Russian Imperial times the island's name was ‘The Saint’. I spent my childhood there, left to myself. It was a very hot region in the summer, where there was almost always windy weather. So I remember the midday heat, the clouds of insects brought by the hurricanes from lakes and the frogs falling from the sky, the desert landscapes connected to the mainland by a railway that ran along a dam built by German prisoners of war. The width of the island is only a few kilometers away and it may be crossed from one coast to another in an hour, ankle-dipping into warm earth, softened from the oil. I also remember my passion for fiction, which my grandmother, the teacher of Russian language and literature, borrowed for me from the local library. Basically, these were the authors of the 19th century – Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London.

During the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, my family emigrated to Ukraine. Before my usual life was interrupted by the war unleashed by the Russian Federation against Ukraine, I spent a lot of time in the outback, in a small dying village surrounded by the forests of the Trakhtemyriv Peninsula, which also has a rich geological and cultural history. It is located in the area of Kanev's dislocations – high steep slopes and mounds on the right bank of the Dnieper, overgrown with bushes, flowering grasses and forests, deep ravines with drastic sides. Directors Parajanov, Ilyenko, Tarkovsky worked here, finding in the local nature what is called a ‘suitable nature’ in cinematography.

Perhaps all that informed my interest in both romantic and naturalistic worldviews, between which there is a tension. This is why I am always wavering in contradiction between sensually-based and a more reflective or conceptually-based approach to work. The romanticism's reception of the fantastic and weird, its obsession with the natural forces as well as its highlighting the extraordinary and excessive features in human nature – this is what I am starting from. At the same time I favor fact and impersonality over the imaginative, symbolic and supernatural in the fictional portrayal of reality. I am also committed to observation and detachment in my practice, maintaining an impersonal tone and ‘disinterested’ point of view including in depiction of human history.... I am close to the sense that the universe itself is indifferent to human life.

What camera gear/editing setup do you use?

I usually use a Mamiya medium format camera and shoot on film. At the moment I am also mastering the Sinar 4x5 large format system.

How do you achieve the look of your photographs and could you take us through the process?

As a rule, I do not use any special post-processing tools for images scanned from the negative and most of the time the processing is minimal; I prefer to print images in a darkroom.

Could you tell us the backstory of some of your photographs?

I started working on the Radiations of War series in March of 2022, when the Kyiv region was liberated from Russian troops and then we first saw what they left there and what the war looks like. That spring was very cold and rainy, along the road riddled with pits from fragments of shells and mines, broken columns of military equipment stretched, near which the corpses of Russian soldiers had not yet been removed. When we were getting out of the car, the dank cold and damp seemed to immediately eat under the skin, the deserted, scorched, destroyed spaces grew in front of us with the torn ghosts of blown up bridges, the crumpled skeletons of huddled civilian cars that were shot or came under fire and completely burned out. I remember very well one of the first locations where we stopped, it was an abandoned private house in Irpin, standing near multi-storey buildings. A fence was demolished there and on the threshold of the house stood a very old big dog, which barked without interruption into the void in front of it, guarding property that had been destroyed and people who were not there. She was blind or shell-shocked, and her barking was like screaming and talking at the same time. Later, I kept meeting abandoned dogs, as if they were guides and companions in this inhuman space of war.

At first, I did not have documents as a journalist and military accreditation from the Ministry of Defense. Roma, a participant in the territorial defense of Irpin city, helped me a lot, with whom we traveled through closed territories thanks to his passes. He was also my talisman, because he believed in God, and I believed in him, so we drove through areas that were dangerous, because there were a lot of unexploded shells or there was a danger of mines. The photograph of the destroyed golf club was (‘Radiations of war #52-34’) taken in just such a place. We were looking for a downed Russian helicopter, but we got here and the police warned us that it might not be safe here. Roma crossed himself and we drove up to the building. The atmosphere there reminded me of the miniseries ‘The Langoliers, based on the book by Stephen King, in which weird creatures devoured fragments of the past world after time had moved into the future.

The photograph 'Radiation of War #79-56' was taken in Irpin city. At that time the son of a murdered man was telling foreign journalists why his father did not leave the city. His father was lying on the grass surrounded by scattered food from a package. It was noticeable that the son had done this many times before, and his speech, gestures, appealing outward to the audience against the backdrop of a mute lying figure, whose gray hair was stirred by the wind, turned what was happening into a terrible, absurd, cruel staging. I thought then that the cruelty and 'theatricality' of this scene speaks of the nature of the war no less definitely than the frame, fixing the grief and suffering of people, since the last is also a certain cutout from reality.

What advice do you have for aspiring photographers?

Perhaps this is not advice, but just observation ... But I noticed that there are shots that are only visual in nature, and in the photographic process that future shot is ‘identified’ immediately, but there is visual material that has a more complex nature, it smells or presses against me, because it has mass, or it makes me dizzy... This material is not only drawn to my eye, it surprises in an unusual way. For me, the more compositive nature the visible has, the more unusual it is to interact with it with the camera, and the more unpredictable the results.