There are layers of reasons why I felt compelled to travel to Odesa in August last year – reasons I didn’t fully understand at first.
It began with rational, altruistic motives. I had supported Ukraine since the start of Russia’s invasion, and I suppose I had invested a great deal of personal feeling into condemning the obvious criminality of Russia’s brutality. Those feelings only deepened as I watched the democratic West’s unwillingness to confront the calamity. A failure that I believe is a disgraceful betrayal.
As the years and the war dragged on, I learned a great deal about the richness of Ukrainian culture. And I discovered how extraordinarily brave and devoted to freedom the Ukrainians I’ve met truly are, in stark contrast it seems to how complacent and self-absorbed many in the UK and beyond have become.
Still, I felt I had an incomplete relationship with the Ukrainians I knew. My sympathy was sincere but lacked substance. I felt both connected and yet still an outsider. So I devised a project that would go beyond my photo documentation of the Ukrainian support movement in London. I had become intrigued by Odesa. Its layered history, beauty and location on the Black Sea. My plan was to spend few weeks there, photographing the city’s spirit, its elegance, and its daily life in the hope of conveying how important it is that this historical yet relatively unknown place be saved from destruction.
I flew to Chișinău and boarded a bus to Odesa, my bags packed with camera gear not knowing what story to invent for visiting as we rattled our way toward the border. The landscape reminded me so much of my homeland in Victoria, Australia with its open fields. It stirred memories of my childhood on a small dairy farm with my mother and sisters. My father had left our family. Unable to afford life in the city, my mother moved us to the countryside seeking a new beginning.
My parents were English immigrants who came to Australia after the Second World War. They had both served during the conflict: my father as a tank commander who fought in the Middle East and later across the Western Front all the way to Berlin; my mother as an ambulance and staff car driver in London. I remembered when I was younger how neither of them spoke much about their wartime experiences. My mother once described the horror of the Blitz, Germany’s relentless bombing campaign of 1941 which lasted for 57 nights yet failed to break Britain’s spirit. She also told me about the Buzz Bombs, the V1 flying bombs the Germans called Hellhounds which first appeared in 1942. She said you could hear them coming at night, a dreadful mechanical hum. At first, you could take some comfort in the sound because once the engines cut out you knew the bomb would glide and explode somewhere else. But later, the Germans introduced a variant that plunged the moment its engine stopped. From then on, she told me, she never felt safe again.
As the bus passed through my first military checkpoint, I realised there were far deeper personal reasons for my journey. I was seeking a greater understanding of my parents. How much had the war effected their psyches, relationship, and ultimately how it had shaped our family’s own fractures and silences.
After a long but thankfully uneventful border crossing, I arrived in Odesa. I was immediately struck by its charm and by a deceptive sense of normality. But that illusion didn’t last. Later that night, I witnessed up close my first Shahed drone attack…
To be continued Part Two of “Day and Night”
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