A Ukrainian artist’s vision of conflict, propaganda and loss

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© Katerina Motylova

In 2022, Katerina Motylova’s debut photobook, Loss, was shortlisted for the Paris Photo/Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award. Here she discusses the work – and what conflict in Ukraine has cost her

By the time Russian forces mounted a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February last year, Katerina Motylova had already lost much to the horrors of war. In 2014, the photographer’s home city of Luhansk was left unrecognisable by the arrival of Russian-backed forces – both her community and its buildings reduced to ruins. Then, her relationship with her parents was broken by their acceptance of Russian propaganda. In the years that followed, she lost her sister, Yulia, to cancer – she was buried in Kyiv where, in early 2022, her final resting place was destroyed.

It was this final injustice that led Motylova to pick up her camera, and to begin asking why all of this had happened – not just to her and her family, but to the Ukrainian people. She set about creating the body of work that would become her self-published photobook, Loss. Through the project, the photographer combines bleak landscapes with quiet, personal moments, in a compelling exploration of her own Ukrainian identity.

© Katerina Motylova.
© Katerina Motylova.

“Maybe, I did not even know who I [was] until I started to lose everything that defined me” 

Motylova began this exploration by looking to the past – to her own family history. “I had this archive of images from different years – these memories of my family’s conversations – and I thought it would be nice to show this complicity of family relations,” she explains, reflecting on her parents’ shift towards pro-Russian ideologies. Before her death, Yulia had helped the photographer to bridge the void created by her mother and father’s differing beliefs. “Now it is empty between us,” she says.

The archival family photographs in Loss show Motylova as a young girl, smiling as she balances on her sister’s knee. Other pictures offer brief insights into the mundanity and safety of family life untroubled by conflict and propaganda. These simple yet intimate images are interspersed with more recent moments – homes with boarded windows, snow covered hills and a freshly dug grave bearing a single red rose.

© Katerina Motylova.
© Katerina Motylova.
© Katerina Motylova.

“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”.

© Katerina Motylova.

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