Balakliya

I’m dreadful at picking up what’s going on in our own town, so hadn’t  realised that the biennial Northern Eye photography festival was on until G returned from town having been accosted by someone in the shopping centre who gave him tickets for a talk taking place at 5 o’clock today. ‘Something to do with Ukraine,’ he tells me. 

I get on line and find out it’s a talk by photographer Marc Wilson about a project he’s undertaken with his Ukrainian wife, Anna. I decide to go. 

It’s fascinating. Marc met Anna back in 2018 when he was working on a project linked to the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. When they married, they spent some time in the little village of Balakliya where she had spent her childhood summers; a simple life of swimming in the river, cooking with grandparents and generally running free. He took a series of photographs capturing the simplicity and timelessness of this little village, and these are now displayed on the walls of this temporary exhibition space - a dingy empty shop within the shopping centre. 

Of course, these were taken in the summers immediately before the invasion, capturing a life repeated all over the country - a life now tragically and dramatically changed. 

Marc and Anna decided to produce a bilingual book of his images with text written in the shadow of the current war - ‘The Land is Yellow,  the Sky is Blue’. Anna, together with friends and relatives, supplies stories of once carefree times, and how these lives have been cruelly changed. 

‘My friend Yanyk, with whom as a child I used to race to jump from the cliff into the river, was in the most perilous spots in eastern Ukraine during the full-scale invasion. He suffered from shellshock.
“I will go back to the front line as soon as I recover,” he told me from his hospital bed. “I will fight until we win, until this war is over.” Meanwhile, his wife and two young daughters, sister, niece, and mother are all waiting for him at home.’ 

Anna reads from the book; it’s heart-wrenching, the contrast between the photos and present reality hard to bear. Someone asks about the children captured swimming in the river. Where are they now? Marc tells us how one family fled from country to country, eventually settling in France - safe, adaptable as all children seem to be, but eyes haunted by their experiences.  

The point is, Anna tells us, that Balakliya could be anywhere, a village community replicated throughout the world. What has happened there could happen anywhere. She knows the world is tired of this war - the Ukrainians are even more exhausted. And of course our eyes are now being taken to another war, another place of suffering - if we can bear to look that is. It is a lesson in how fragile our way of life can be. 

Marc asks us all if we can do one thing; can we go away from here and tell those we meet what we have seen and heard tonight. And so I do. 

https://www.marcwilson.co.uk/book-print-sales/p/theland