What Young Ukrainians Have Lost Overnight
What Young Ukrainians Have Lost Overnight
Three years ago, Mark Peckmezian made vibrant portraits of youths on the streets of Kyiv and Odesa. “Now there’s nothing in the future,” one says.
By Sophie Pinkham
March 16, 2022
A portrait of a young person.
Between 2017 and 2020, the Berlin-based photographer Mark Peckmezian made portraits of young people whom he met on the street during travels across Europe and beyond. He published the series last year, in a book titled “Nice.” But there was one country that he found himself drawn back to repeatedly. “For a portrait photographer, Ukraine is rich, because you find a lot of strong faces and great style,” Peckmezian, a native of Toronto, told me recently. “On top of this, I found the temperament of the people I met there hilarious and refreshing. Ukrainians have an incredibly dry affect and a hard sense of humor, and speak with bracing directness.” His portraits from Ukraine, taken in Kyiv and Odesa in 2018 and 2019, capture the gamut of youthful emotions: exhilaration and anxiety, self-confidence and self-doubt, raucous friendliness and moody introspection. In many of the photos, the candy-colored nineteenth-century buildings and carnival attractions in Kyiv’s Podil neighborhood make a background as vibrant as the faces on display.
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th, launching a vicious war that has already killed thousands of Ukrainians and driven nearly three million from the country, Peckmezian’s portraits became documents of a past suddenly lost, of youth ruptured by violence and grief. Speaking recently by phone, Varvara, a young woman whom Peckmezian met in Kyiv, was in tears from the beginning of the call to the end. Sergey, who appears as a beautiful boy in Peckmezian’s portrait from Kyiv, was now sitting in the dark because of the city’s curfew—light in the window might attract bombers. Of the eleven young people I was able to reach last week, some had escaped to the relative safety of western Ukraine. Others had made it out of the country, and several remained in Kyiv or its outskirts. Those from the eastern Ukrainian territories of Luhansk and Donetsk, which were seized by Russia-backed separatists in 2014, are experiencing their second displacement in less than a decade. Lisa, a twenty-three-year-old from Luhansk, told me, “When you’ve lost your sense of safety at home—twice—you rethink everything.”
I’m from Kyiv, but at the moment I’m with my family in western Ukraine. We had to leave our home and go to stay with my aunt, along with several other families. Since the Army hasn’t taken me yet, my family and I sit in the basement making camouflage nets from old military linens. Along with the rest of the people in the city, we build checkpoints and make Molotov cocktails.
On February 24th, my mother called me at five in the morning, saying, “It’s started, kids, you have to hide.” Everything after that blurs together in one endless, frightening day. We got into the car in our pajamas and went to get my mother. The streets to get out of the city were packed. All I had with me were socks, underwear, my laptop, and a charger.
At my mother’s house, we sat and cried and thought about what to do next. We decided to run. As soon as we went downstairs we heard the air-raid siren. We rushed to the nearest shelter, a metro station. There were lots of people sitting on the floor, children, dogs, suitcases. After half an hour, the alarm was over. We decided to leave immediately, since there might not be another chance. We got to our friends’ dacha and they took us in, even though they already had nine people in the house. We’ve been living here for twelve days. An oil plant burned down right nearby. The fire was so huge that for a night it was as bright as noon.
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https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/what-young-ukrainians-have-lost-overnight
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