Photographers worked hard in harsh conditions to capture the searing images of the EuroMaidan Revolution. Many are now taking even greater risks to cover Russia's war against Ukraine.
When the revolution kicked off in November, Ivan Bogdan, a 40-year-old commercial director living in Kyiv, saw it as a chance to advance in his hobby, which had been limited to portraits and landscapes.
Bogdan felt the urge to photograph the protests in its very early days. He was disappointed by the similarity of all the photos in the local news media. So he bought a good camera and began posting images to his Facebook page.
He worried that shooting protesters without a press identification will get him in trouble with riot police, so he forged it. It didn’t help him much on Dec. 1, when police officers kicked him near the Presidential Administration during the first wave of violence against protesters.
He kept his regular job, but spends his weekends as a volunteer delivering aid to the Ukrainian army in the east and photographing the war zone. During one of the trips he made a photo series “500 flags of Ukraine” showing soldiers with Ukraine’s yellow-and-blue flag. He’s been providing photos to Ukrainian media for free, but only to publications he deems patriotic.
Unlike him, Oleksandr Ratushnyak already was a professional photographer before the EuroMaidan Revolution, which prompted him to leave commercial studio photography. He says he documented the crimes of the riot police and expected the investigators to ask for the photos, but they never did.
On Feb. 18, Ratushnyak was wounded in the leg with a Kalashnikov bullet.
In August, he went to the war zone and stayed for a month, returning frequently. He photographed soldiers and civilians. His pictures were bought by Agence-France Presse and printed in the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag.
Anatolii Boiko photographs EuroMaidan protesters from a bridge over Instytutska Street on Feb. 18, 2014. (Andriy Gorb)
Another amateur turned professional, Petro Zadorozhniy visited the war zone in Ukraine’s east at least a dozen times starting from July. Working in marketing and being a co-founder of LUFA photo agency, the 24-year-old started freelancing as a photographer for international and local media. His photos have been published in The New York Times, BBC and Reuters.
He didn’t stop even after his best friend and photography partner Viktor Gurniak was killed while fighting in the Aidar Battalion in October. He can make $100-$150 per day, but it’s still not enough.
Julia Polunina-But, 29, says she choose the artistic over the journalist approach. The photographer from Russian-occupied Simferopol built barricades during the EuroMaidan Revolution. She made pictures of the long barricade at Hrushevskoho Street and created a book called “Barricade” – which has only one fold-out photo that is 4.5 meters long.
Working on the book helped Polunina-But fight depression because of the annexation of Crime. Her book is not well-known in Ukraine but selling in Austria for 45 euros.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliana Romanyshyn can be reached at [email protected].
