Book tip: The History War

Furious testimonies, powerful documentation, and merciless images: Magnum photographer Larry Towell's new book is hard to stomach. Yet it seems necessary, as the war in Ukraine continues unhindered – relentless and brutal. With hundreds of pictures over 372 pages, the photographer confronts us with his experiences over the last ten years. “I believe that this project is an important testimonial for a political crises that will define international relationships and reverberate over decades to come,” the photographer states. “It is also a challenge for a world that is oversaturated with news images.” In fact, no agency, no magazine would show some of these pictures. Death was a constant companion; the corpses that Towell has seen and photographed are beyond count. Repeatedly hitting the release button was a necessary decision for him – also to come to terms with and atone for the war crimes at some point.

Towell was in Ukraine for the first time in 2014 during the Maidan uprising, and was a witness to the last days of violent clashes between protestors and the police in Kiev. As a result of this experience, the photographer decided to dedicate himself long-term to the history and upheavals in the country, returning there time and again over the years. So, the second chapter in the book deals with the devastated area around Chernobyl, and the starting point of the nuclear disaster in April 1986. In 2017, Towell was close to the restricted zone. He stepped illegally over the line, and was caught by the police. Luckily for him, being a Canadian, the security guards considered it too much effort to arrest him. Many villages around there are now being repopulated by refugees from the war zones, as the health risks seems to be considered less serious than the dangers of war. The rest of the chapters deal with Towell's time in the east, in Donbass in 2018, a Ukrainian Army deployment in Bachmut, the time he spent with separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk, and, finally, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its gruesome consequences, including harsh images of the exhumation of civilian graves and crimes against humanity in Bucha.

The author refers to The History War quite simply as a “book about Ukraine by a person”, a subjective history book that honours the Ukrainians' centuries-long struggle for freedom. Because of its design, the book goes beyond the usual forms of publication, and, as a result, also questions the possibilities of the photo book format. In order to include the historical component, Towell's uses masses of illustrative material that he found. A jumble of discarded ephemera: historical family photos, advertising motifs, playing cards, hotel cards and postcards, crushed cigarette packets, things left behind by Russian soldiers. The collages are multi-layered: there are reproductions of old scrapbooks filled with new war pictures. And the images of monuments destroyed by bullets also tell of past glories and the passage of time. The result is an extremely unique and powerful work, where the photographer's reports and mementoes almost seem to burst out of the cover, and for sure go way beyond classic photo-journalistic war reporting.