I look at this girl with her dog on the destroyed bridge at Irpin, the concrete rubble and am amazed that the picture brings back memories for me, even though the war is still in full swing.
The image is iconic, like a ship pushing the memory into my mind.
The war already has depth in time, its own past.
Yet today loses none of its pure madness: a rocket hits the heart of Kyiv, another hits a shopping center full of people in Kremenchug, a school burns in Avdeevka, in Lysychansk starving people sit under fire in cellars.
Are these military reports?
People are posting on social media: This is my house;
this is my school;
that was my friend.
They report with their ruins, which have taken the place of where they lived.
They report their dead.
Four months of war, but the mind refuses to comprehend such a reality.
I'm amazed that I'm so captivated by this restrained image from Irpin.
I keep writing about Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, as if I couldn't accept a larger speck of war in me, as if I wanted to reduce the war to humanly measurable territory.
One suspects that the girl with the dog will disappear from the edge of the destroyed bridge into the unknown.
Only the ruin remains.
The fate of the girl is uncertain, like in this gray mist.
But one thing is clear: the girl, and everyone else in this country, has a destiny that is forever engraved by the war.
The photographer Mila Teshaieva shows the fateful.
Right at the beginning of the war she went from Berlin, where she lives, to Kyiv, where she was born: "If the war comes to my home, I want to be at home," she writes in her photo diary, which is now is exhibited in the Berlin House of European Cultures.
"Splinters of Life.
Ukraine Diary” is the name of this impressive document from the first months of the war.
Restrained images, terse words: the photographer moves between documenting atrocities and not directly depicting violence.
In doing so, she raises the fundamental question of how to avoid creating even more damage and pain for the protagonists through images of dramatic events.
The photographer also moves in the landscape of death in search of fragments of life.
Her voice is strong and quiet, like a barometer of feelings, she fluctuates between the individual and the collective, between sadness and trust.
An epic tale of war and resistance emerges from the fragments.
Waiting crowds in the dark of the crowded Kiev railway station;
the smile of a woman rescuing abandoned animals;
a famous monument, laden with sacks, of which only a horse's tail remains;
a man in the bunker, between boxes, tries to find radio reception;
and again and again dust, ruins, bullet fragments and people on the edge of this destroyed world.
The angular and the warm
There is tension between the diary's images and text, between the angular shapes in the photos and the embracing warmth of the stories.
They don't fit together, and this aesthetic also shows that everything gets out of joint during war.
The picture is almost colorless, only the girl's jacket is bright yellow, it will stick in my memory.
The girl's dog looks sideways warily, as if on sentry duty.
Two very young soldiers from the "Local Defense" wear yellow ribbons.
A soldier looks into the camera and rests his chin on his rifle.
Weary.
The railings of the bridge are painted in the colors of the Ukrainian flag, and the sky has a touch of blue too.
Yellow and blue seep through the image.
But the gray dominates on this dull day.
For hours, the photographer watched the people who escaped across the destroyed bridge: "An infinite pain penetrates me, because I do not understand why they, why this horror is happening to us." The girl looks at us from a destroyed bridge down, from the height of their non-childish experience.