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Warning: This story contains graphic images of war and death.
When Edward Bertinsky was honored Tuesday for his contribution to photography, he decided to share the spotlight with Ukrainians documenting the war with their cameras.
Bertinsky, a Ukrainian-Canadian photographer, won the award for his outstanding contribution to photography at the Sony World Photography Awards in London.
St. Catharines, Ontario-born photographer Spent decades photographing industrial landscapesTake comprehensive shots of tailings ponds, sawmills, potash mines, and landfills.
In his acceptance speech he said, “As a Ukrainian-Canadian, I would like to share this award with artists from Ukraine, many of whom courageously document the desecration of their peoples and lands,” Globe and Mail reports.
Talk to Burtynsky as it happens Guest Nahla Ayed on Wednesday. Here is part of their conversation.
Why did you want to share this award with your fellow artists in Ukraine?
In many ways, what I've done with my job is go into parts of the world that are hard to reach and out of most people's sight. But nonetheless, in a way, it has a huge impact on our world, the worlds it depicts.... And so it's kind of an idea [of] Bringing light into what was previously a dark area in our mind and consciousness and bringing it forward. And I think what the frontline paparazzi do in Ukraine is pretty much that.
If their eyes are not there and the cameras do not show us what is happening, then, somehow, we do not understand the degree of tragedy and horror that Ukraine is now experiencing.
Far from the actual craft, what you do and what you do is quite similar as it chronicles injuries. Displays ground injury records. They record the injuries of their country and its people. How hard is the job they do covering this war as photographers?
[At] At any moment a bomb could hit them. And in fact, you know, one of the artists I talked to, Maxime Dondyuk, is his best friend [Maks Levin], who was also a photographer, was murdered several weeks ago. And so the danger is that there are soldiers on the other side of that, they see the camera.
So the difference between me being there is that someone wasn't trying to kill me. This is a big difference.
You mentioned photographer Maxim Dondyuk. Tell me more about him. What do you like most about him and his work?
He was very similar to me in terms of photographing the landscapes of the region around Donbass. Then when war broke out in 2014, He went and photographed buildings that had been bombed, sort of after the war. And there were these amazing pictures in the winter and these kind of places being bombed and standing there. He also made a whole series about Chernobyl.
I had a real kind of respect for what he was doing. And there was a strong aesthetic that we shared and a belief that, in a way, he's making images that I think are powerful and won't be consumed and absorbed and left in the past - that these images are so well thought out and well designed and will go into the future as records this time around.
Why is it so important that you help him and Ukraine?
It's just a moment in history that I never thought I'd see, and I don't think a lot of people expected something like that to happen. So I think the importance of capturing that and making sure there is a record of it - a photograph or a photograph of it - is critical.
And I know that those images appearing today and all along will help keep Ukraine in the news. Because you just don't want to become a background war when there is so much at stake.
There is a country It has 6000 nuclear bombs chemical bombs and [is] Too big compared to the country they're attacking. So it is the story of David and Goliath. And, you know, I think most of the free world wants to see David win.
It's a story of David and Goliath, but it's also a very personal story for you. How much of what you do for Ukraine stems from a sense of responsibility for your background?
That was my first language. And I still speak Ukrainian with my mom and sister.
[My mother is] She's about to turn 98. She lived through Stalin and great hunger When she was seven and eight years old. She remembers going to bed hungry every night. Her father was able to bring food home every now and then, and they had a cow from which they could get some milk. And she said, "We survived because we have that cow." But the other people in her neighborhood did not survive and died.
Years later, when she was 17 years old, Hitler came along, blocked all roads to her village and took her on a ferry train back to Germany. And [she] They were chosen primarily because they chose slaves for their farms, and unpaid labour, to provide food for the German army during the war.
She lived it, now she's in a retirement home and she's watching this again. And she told me before I came to London that she wished she hadn't seen this, that she had worked hard to liberate Ukraine, and she was...the president of the Women's League for the Liberation of Ukraine. And now seeing this is a terrible thing for her.
See photos from inside the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol:
This war and this time will be...probably...one of the most documented wars in history. I was just wondering [if we can get] A final word from you about how important still photography is in preserving the memory of what happened.
I can remember a story when I was telling the students about the difference between the movie and the footage, and I said, "Think about the Vietnam War."
That was actually one of the first wars in which footage was brought back to people in America and abroad as the war was unfolding. It was the first truly televised war.
But if we look at it today, I mean, we don't remember the video footage of that war. but we remember Still pictures of the girl running from napalm or Eddie Black's photo of a man being shot in the street. And there are half a dozen of these still-life photos... etched in our memory as a reminder of what that war was all about.
And that war has not been dated to any degree as it is. So I think in the end it's the still images that have persisted through history and become the focal points for what happened at that time in history. So I think it plays a very important role in determining the events of a particular time in history.
Written by Sheena Goodyear. Interview produced by Kate Suger. Questions and answers have been modified for length and clarity.
#Photography
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