Photo book In Limbo shows land in conflict

by time news

Dthrough the window of a bus you can see couples kissing goodbye. It’s cold but sunny. Very romantic, you think, but the background isn’t at all. The photo was taken after the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, when many Ukrainians left the peninsula.

Photographer Florian Bachmeier has been documenting Ukraine since 2013. His pictures show a country that was not surprised by the war, because the war had been there for a long time. In the east, front lines sometimes run right through a city, as in Marjinka in Donetsk Oblast. When school starts there after the holidays, the building has to be secured with sandbags and marked: The students should only stay where green tape means the all-clear. War refugees arrive in Mariupol, which was still peaceful at the time. Many are now looking for work in the west of the country, leaving home and home behind.

And on the other hand, in 2014, when the Maidan in Kyiv was full of protesters who wanted to withdraw from Russian influence and turn to Europe, there were demonstrations in this east Ukrainian region against the new government elections. When the election took place and the pro-European Petro Poroshenko became the new president, hardly anyone in Donetsk had gone to the polls. In Russia, it’s mostly older women who cheer and vote for Putin. In Donetsk, one suspects, things don’t look that different. And in the background on Lenin Square, the lettering of the Russian Sberbank shines green and meaningful.

Bakhchisaray, 2014. Departures after the annexation of Crimea





picture series



Ukraine photo book “In Limbo”
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The war was always there

Bachmeier’s pictures show in a calm way how history is inscribed in the topography. Hardly any place is spared from the threats and impositions of the past and present. What do the birches in the Pripyat swamps carry from the meltdown at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant? What does the gorge of Drobyzkyj Yar near Kharkiv know about the horrific massacre that the SS carried out there in the winter of 1941, what remains of the 16,000 victims, most of them Jews? Hoarfrost covers the places, grey-brown vegetation is the connecting aesthetic element.

It’s still winter in many parts of Ukraine, and the ground is muddy, as the Russian army felt when tanks got stuck in the fields near Kyiv. Florian Bachmeier is on his way back to the country he has been accompanying for so long to continue writing history. Spring is gradually arriving in the pictures that are now being created.

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