Author(s): Sergii Belinskyi,Yulia Ivashko,Iryna L. Kravchenko,Andrii Dmytrenko,Iryna Dreval / Language(s): English
Issue: 25/2023
Technical achievements have made it possible to observe the tragic events of war in Ukraine bothin real time and in the distribution of photos and videos, which become the property of the wholeworld via the Internet. Despite the fact that there is a lot of visual information illustrating theseevents, avant-garde methods of conveying the horrors of war can be distinguished. In particular,such methods are used by one of the authors of the article, Serhii Belinskyi, who is a fine-art pho-tographer and a press officer of the Knights of the Winter Campaign 28th mechanized brigadeduring the war. His original peacetime style consisted in presenting the world through inanimateobjects, nature and animals, or by presenting fragments of the human body (legs, hands, oftenwith light effects).We will omit his official photos on the brigade’s website and only analyze the use ofavant‑garde proprietary techniques during the war. Only photos featuring inanimate objects,nature and animals, as well as those representing fragments of human bodies (legs, hands) havebeen selected for the analysis. The following techniques can be distinguished in them:- using an unusual angle from below (showing the Easter blessing through rows of soldiers’ feet)- giving symbolic meaning to ordinary objects (an icon in a ruined church, a road sign, a sewn-up heart, a book of fairy tales, a flowering tree in front of a tank)- introducing intentional asymmetry of the frame plane and a change of the direction of looking – not from left to right, but from right to left (a cow by a destroyed cowshed)- presenting a fragmentary image of a human body part, in this case belonging to military personnel (legs, arms)- using contrasts of light and shadow- demonstrating the war with weapons and military equipment- supplementing the photo with a caption explaining the artist's main ideaThe use of these techniques means that such photographs turn into tragic art for the pho-tographer.How do art photographers see the world? The peculiarities of Serhii Belinskyi's vision ofthe world are as follows:- conveying one's own emotions through inanimate objects, landscapes, and animals, i.e., a "world without people"- photography as a means of psychological protection against the trauma of war, as theartist maximally concentrates on the frame.
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