August 4, 2003, (near) Tikrit, Iraq © Geert van Kesteren Courtesy the artist
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A soldier's picture diary from S Ossetia

15.08.08 | Florence Waters

This is an incredibly moving picture diary from the battlefield of S. Ossetia. Following my blog post from Monday, I wanted to draw attention to it.

It is staggering on many levels. Just days after combat, it gives the world an icredibly honest humanist view of what the war conditions are like for the Russians fighting.

The overtone of the series of pictures is not political. The pictures do not illustrate a point - or an article, as they do in the media. No Western journalist would have had this insight.  What I like the most about the series of pictures, is the layers of content: You get an idea of the horrors of the fighting, You see the battle field from all perspectives - from a distant landscape, right up to the bloody wound. The soldier's tale sensitively portrays something of the relationship that he has with his friends in the army, the effect of the death in the homes.

There are often very striking juxtapositions between the pictures too. One picture, showing a bashed up, burnt out army vehicle and a killed boy directly below it. Tragically, the next image shows a moving army vehicle making its way home - with the victorious soldiers waving and cheering.

Hopefully it will not get removed before you can see it:

http://www.navoine.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?p=551

WARNING: Images of gore and death

Text reads:

Presenting to your attention Arkady's report from the war zone. Reminder that he went from Valdikavkaz to Djava and then to Tsivanhal. Was part of of assault on Zemo-Nikozi, then went with the batallion West towards Gori and while towards there came back on the helicopter with the wounded.

 

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Soldier's picture diary
2 Comment(s):
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In some ways, these pictures seem typical of those that soldiers take--pictures of their comrades, of the effects of weapons,of the dead. One of the key features that comes out of the accounts of the photography of abuse at Abu Ghraib is how widespread the use of cameras by soldiers is, and how many of them would photograph prisoners and corpses, just as we see here.

I wonder about the lack of politics. It's true that the pictures are direct, relatively unskilled and designed to depict what is there in front of the lens without mannered juxtapositions made to produce political points. But I guess that the Ossetians grieving their dead or holding up shell fragments, along with the devastated apartment blocks, do make a point about the assault on them by the Georgian military.

But what are the motives behind taking such pictures? How do they circulate and how are they used? And how has the net transformed all this?

Julian Stallabrass. 15th Aug 2008. 21:50

In many ways, I found these photos to be an intriguing analogue to the war prose by which Arkady Babchenko made his name. It is interesting how you say that ' No Western journalist would have had this insight', which I think is correct. Babchenko began as a soldier in the Chechan Wars, before becoming a journalist and subsequently being embedded, as he is prsently. This is unlikely to happen in the Western media, and I think lends the photos some varying levels; one part of him will always be a Russian soldier, but the journalist in him can see the other side with a detached clarity. This adds to the humanism of the photos certainly; whether it renders it apolitical, or just politically ambiguous is a more difficult question.

Ben G. 18th Aug 2008. 12:45
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