The title sounds like a slogan from yesterday: Stop Tanks With Books. Don’t let that fool you: Mark Neville’s photo book has by no means been rendered obsolete by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. On the contrary, the events of the last few days make the observations in this book all the more clairvoyant. As part of a sociographic project, Neville first came to the contested regions of Donbass and took pictures of people and their lives on both sides of the barricades. Supplemented by texts that on the one hand reflect everyday experiences and on the other hand deal with questions of changing national identities, the volume paints a picture of a war that didn’t just begin last week. Neville pays particular attention to the “internally displaced persons”, the more than two million refugees in their own country who have already lost their homes in the Donbass conflicts of recent years. Although clearly committed to the independence of the state of Ukraine, Neville maintains a differentiated view – and therefore also gives hope: the individual always contains a variety of courage, adaptability, pragmatism and ambivalence.
Der Freitag: Mr. Neville, it’s 10.30 a.m. Monday morning in your country in the Ukraine. What is your current situation?
Mark Neville: My partner and I lived in the center of Kyiv, 50 meters from the President’s office. We were woken up by the sirens on Thursday, from then on the question was: do we go or stay? My partner has health problems and I had to balance my responsibility for her with my job as a documentary photographer, which was very difficult. When we heard that Russia was planning to bomb the presidential palace, we knew we had to get out. Colleagues of mine left town in a van and had two seats to ourselves. Among thousands of others fleeing westward, we were stuck in a traffic jam non-stop for a whole day. Two days ago we arrived in Lviv and I tried to get my partner across the border to Poland. We spent the day at the station, four trains in a row were cancelled, thousands crowded the station, it was a dangerous situation, there were almost dead people in the crowd. When it was clear that we wouldn’t be able to get on the train, we tried to get to the border in a taxi. Traffic jam again, 30 kilometers before the border it was clear that our taxi driver had to turn around in order to be back before the curfew at 10 p.m. We considered walking the 30km, but decided against it at night and in the cold, snow falls here. So we drove back with him and spent the night with friends. We found an apartment yesterday, so here we are. Nobody here knows what to do now. What’s so frustrating is that this didn’t start last Thursday, it’s been going on for eight fucking years.
They wanted to stop the tanks with this book. What has changed for you since the outbreak of war?
What’s so amazing to me is that I finished my writing for the book on New Year’s Day. So seven weeks ago, and everything I write about, my call to action for the West – membership in NATO, exclusion from SWIFT, military support – is still just as relevant. I’m not a political strategist, I’m an open-minded, reasonably talented guy in my fifties from London who moved to Ukraine two years ago. If I could have foreseen what was going to happen, then politicians around the world must have foreseen it. When I first came to Ukraine in 2015, I immediately recognized the pain in people’s eyes, including in Kyiv, even though the war in Donbass was 600 kilometers away. People died there every day, I was there so many times. That’s why I made this book. The idea for this came up five years ago. And a week before it’s published, the war begins. For two years I fought to get it printed. My first publisher let me down badly. I broke up with him late last year and approached Nazraeli Press in California. They agreed straight away and we worked day and night to translate it into three languages: English, Ukrainian, Russian. We want to be transparent and not hide anything from the Russians. In general, most people in Ukraine also speak Russian and have Russian friends and relatives. This conflict is not about language or anti-Russianism.
Mark Neville was born in London in 1966 and studied art at Goldsmith College. His photo reportage London/Pittsburgh on behalf of the New York Times was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. In 2004 he spent a year in Port Glasgow and made the resulting coffee table book freely available exclusively to the city’s 8,000 households
You sent 750 copies to politicians and others who you believed could prevent this war. Did you also send copies to Russia – and if so, to whom?
About 50. Vladimir Putin got an issue. And various NGOs that I cannot name. They put themselves in danger by accepting the offer of a copy. It is said that anyone who supports Ukrainians in Russia today faces up to 20 years in prison for treason.
We were struck by how nuanced your book is.
I firmly believe that art can change something, even more than politicians, diplomats and negotiations. She reaches people emotionally. This is what changes their attitude towards war. Siegfried Sassoon’s poem about the First World War or pop songs about the Vietnam War have changed how people think and feel about what is going on around them and in the world. I wanted to make an emotional connection with this book. Photos alone are not enough for this, because photos can all too easily be misunderstood, misclassified or put into the wrong context. Photos are an extremely ambivalent matter. While I’m proud of my photos, I don’t expect more from them than they are capable of. That’s why the book also includes research from the Center for East European and International Studies (ZOis), whose staff spoke to some of the 2.5 million Ukrainians who have already become displaced persons in their own country as a result of the war. And it contains short stories by the Ukrainian writer Lyuba Yakimchuk, who use different characters to tell what it means to live under Russian occupation in the Donbass. She was there herself in 2014. People are tortured there, kidnapped.
Your projects often lead to different results than expected. In 2010 you were commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in London to work as a “war artist” in Afghanistan. This resulted in a book about post-traumatic stress disorders, which you yourself contracted after the deployment. It was then in turn requested by a military hospital in Kyiv. Do you have any hope that your current book, even if it didn’t prevent war, could spark something else entirely?
My book is a kind of social sculpture. You never know what will happen to it, it’s beyond my control. For me it’s more interesting than just publishing photos in newspapers or showing them in a museum. In my view, an artist who works with contemporary witnesses has a responsibility to find new and unconventional ways in which his art can reach people. We photographers have an ethical responsibility because our subject is reality, with real, identifiable people. Photography is not the window to the world, it does not show objective truths, so we must use it responsibly. I’ve always had my problems with the art world. In my opinion, it doesn’t make enough effort to reach “very real people”. I’ve always tried to appeal to other sections of the population. For example with my book Battle Against Stigma. When I came back from Afghanistan I was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was a sane, mindful, open-minded man in my mid-40s. If it was so hard for me to seek help, how hard must it be for a soldier who’s been taught his whole life to pull himself together? I wanted to reach these people with my book. That’s not to say the art world isn’t open-minded audiences, and museums and galleries can’t be valuable forums, too.
And museums and galleries reach people who are powerful.
Exactly. Who have the money to buy art. That’s a good back door.
Let’s talk again about the 2.5 million displaced persons within Ukraine. How did you come across this topic?
I was asked by the Center for East European and International Studies (ZOis) in Berlin if I would accompany a large-scale research project in the Donbass as a “visual ethnographer”. I had met Gwendolyn Sasse, the director, a few years earlier when she was a professor at the University of Oxford and was organizing a symposium on social inequality in London, which I did a photo report on for the New York Times had made. So it came about that I traveled through Ukraine for six months, conducting interviews with the people there and photographing them. What really impressed me at the time was that I had often been in extremely difficult places in my career and most of the time the people there asked me for help and money because I looked to them like a wealthy western man. The people I met in Ukraine had lost everything, but they didn’t ask me for anything. They sat down with me and told their story. That’s remarkable and one of the reasons why I moved to Ukraine. I was then declared insane. But I haven’t regretted moving here for a minute. And I don’t regret it now either.
Stop Tanks With Books Mark Neville Nazraeli Press 2022, 180 S., 50 £