Eight days ago, Russian troops invaded Ukraine. In the terrifying war that resulted, one thing that shines through is the incredible resilience of the Ukrainian people. It is something that Mark Neville, a British photographer based in Kyiv, has known for years. The three children in his photograph The Choir at Kyiv Lavra Church, taken in 2017, could as well be the national emblem for the Ukrainian resistance. Dressed in local clothes, standing in front of their Orthodox church, these children are looking at us with pride and defiance. ‘Don’t mess with us’, they seem to say.
The image is part of Neville’s book Stop Tanks with Books, on which he has worked since 2017 and which was published at breakneck speed when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine became imminent. Printed in English, Ukrainian, and Russian, the book contains a selection of 80 photographs of Ukrainians, accompanied by stories from Ukrainian novelist Lyuba Yakimchuk and research from the Centre of Eastern European Studies in Berlin. “With sirens sounding I am sitting here in Lviv, Western Ukraine, looking at this photo I took in a small town in Donbas, nearly one year ago” reads Neville’s Instagram post from earlier this week. “People here are the bravest and most resilient I have ever known. They will never surrender their homes, and they will never be defeated.”
I first encountered Mark Neville in a 2020 online studio visit organised by The Photographer’s Gallery, where he talked to us from his studio in Ukraine. Things were relatively stable at the time, although the country was still reeling from Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014. When Neville first came to Ukraine that same year, he was shocked to hear that around 2 million people had been forced to flee their homes after the annexation of Crimea – one the biggest displacements in the world, but rarely reported on by international media. So Neville did what he always does when making photographs: he immersed himself in the local community. He travelled through the country, photographing and interviewing the people of Ukraine.
Most of Neville’s subjects look straight at us, seeming fully at ease with the photographer. There are more formal looking portraits of people in uniform - soldiers and police officers - but mostly the book contains snapshots of people busy with everyday life. A woman is shopping at her local butcher, families are enjoying the beach in Odessa. And there are many children. A girl in the countryside dressed in colourful clothes stands behind a plentiful harvest of pumpkins; a ginger-haired boy is captured against a backdrop of grey, dull Soviet architecture, putting his fist forward in a gesture of triumph. Life goes on, the book appears to say, despite adversity and misfortune.
Until last week.
What can art do in the face of such horror? Make sure that the photographs that matter are seen by the relevant people, as a start. This is why Neville has just sent out 750 copies of Stop Tanks with Books to the people who have it in their power to help Ukraine: politicians, media members, wealthy business people, academics, celebrities. The book includes a specific set of actions the international community can take.
Neville has always made sure that his photography books were not just a mirror, but also a means. Often working with communities which were in some way disadvantaged – inhabitants of former industrial towns like Port Glasgow and Pittsburgh, people living in the vicinity of Chernobyl, a farming community in Brittany – Neville would not just make free copies available to the members of the communities he photographed, but also send copies to people and institutions who might in some way be able to help improve their lives.
This is how Neville came to Ukraine in 2016. Commissioned as a war artist for the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand, Afghanistan a few years earlier, Neville’s resulting book Battle against Stigma combines the intimate and honest portraits that he is known for with direct accounts from the soldiers about their experiences of PTSD (including his own: Neville wrote beautiful account of his experience with PTSD in The Independent in 2015). That there was a stigma attached to PTSD in the army was apparent: 500 copies of the book were seized at customs by UK Border Force. However, a second consignment entered the UK via a different route and Neville distributed these copies to Defence Mental Health Services, prison libraries, homeless veterans, probation services, and veteran mental health charities. The response was overwhelming, judging by the emails he received from other sufferers and family members.
A military hospital in Kyiv, having heard about the book, requested a Ukrainian language version for its patients, and so in 2016 Neville spent two days at the hospital. In his 2020 studio talk he recounts how on the second day of his visit to Kyiv military hospital, a group of child performers visited, wearing traditional dress. “What happens when a country is at war is that people tend to identify more directly with the symbolism of what their country culturally stands for, so that means a lot of people returning to things such as national costume, a focus on the core elements of being Ukrainian.”
The attention of the whole world is now on what it means to be Ukrainian. What it means to fight for freedom, for democracy. Neville’s photographs in Stop Tanks with Books remind us what freedom looks like in all its proud, colourful glory. They remind us what being free looks like in the faces of people, in the subtle gesturing of their hands, their upright shoulders, their confident smiles. And they remind us that freedom and art are inextricably connected. Neville said it beautifully an interview with The Guardian last week. “What changes people’s minds about a conflict is a poem, a song, or a photograph. It’s people’s feelings that need to be changed. To my mind, that’s the role of the artist.”
Stop Tanks with Books is available to pre-order via Setanta (UK and Europe) and Nazraeli Press (US)
The mayor of London has just issued a helpful list of charities charities to donate to on their How you can Help Ukraine page.