An Inconvenient Place

What is a place? A place where things happened, horrible things, the traces of which have been erased? Ukraine, for a long time, has been filled with these ‘inconvenient places’ which embarrass everyone, no matter which side of post-Soviet memorial politics they stand on: crimes of Stalinism, crimes of Nazism, crimes of nationalists, crimes of Russians; the killings follow one after another on this battered territory which aspires only to a form of peace and normality.

With the photographer Antoine d’Agata, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Jonathan Littell began to survey Babyn Yar, the site of the 1941 massacre of the Jews of Kyiv, and the traces left on the landscape. The war came to interrupt their work. It resumed quite quickly in another form, in another place, the small suburban town of Bucha, which became infamous after the discovery of the atrocities perpetrated there by the Russian occupying forces. Again, a place where things happened; again, a place whose traces we erase as quickly as possible. How then to write, how to photograph, when there is literally nothing to see – or almost nothing?

‘What makes this powerful book so impressive is that it confronts everything – to the point of veering off course, of travelling far back into the past, of accumulating the twists, the strata, of narrative, image and investigation. At once a historical study, a testimony of the events unfolding as you read these lines, an inquiry into war crimes and a remembrance of the dead, it comes as close as possible to what its authors came to seek in the streets of Ukraine.’ — Le Monde

Format/pages: paperback / 352 pages

ISBN: 9781804271124

Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions

Year: 2024