“My first reaction was rejection,” Motylova says of the moment, in early 2022, when she first discovered that Vladimir Putin’s troops had entered Ukraine. By this time the photographer was living in the Netherlands, where she turned to friends for support. They reassured her that the war would be over soon. “I kept repeating. ‘Guys, be ready, it will not stop. It will not go,’” she recalls.
Now, a year on, Motylova’s friends have come to agree with her. The Ukrainians among them have been confronted with many difficult questions. “Because of this war, we began asking ourselves who we are; whether we Ukrainians or Russians,” Motylova explains. This was formerly an ethical question, she says, but it is now a more fundamental one – her identity, including her Jewish heritage, has become tied to the wider narrative of the war.
This complex story is interwoven throughout Loss. Snapshots of peaceful moments are overlaid, crowded, almost confused alongside shots of towering, Soviet-era buildings. A simple portrait of Yulia, taken in a refugee camp in the months before her death, punctuates the pages, as do emotional notes penned by Motylova. In a lengthy passage towards the book’s close, she writes: “I had never really thought about identity issues. Maybe, I did not even know who I [was] until I started to lose everything that defined me”.