Little attention has been paid to the conflict in eastern Ukraine that started in 2014. Who knows, maybe there wasn’t enough rioting, but the rest of the world didn’t feel the need to keep its eyes on the embattled Donetsk Basin, which is partly ruled by armed separatists. But now the crisis there is coming to a head once again. The separatists are supported politically, militarily and personally by Russia, which is now inclined to question the statehood of Ukraine as a whole. The Russians are massing troops in the region, Ukraine is trying to rearm, and the danger of war is growing by the day.
In a few weeks, the Bamberg reporter and photographer Till Mayer will travel to the crisis area again. Most recently, he was in Ukraine in autumn 2021 to report on the difficult living conditions of the population. For him, such trips are a painful thing, he says, “because Ukraine has grown on me.” He always feared that the situation would deteriorate again one day.
Years ago, Mayer had planned an exhibition of his Ukraine pictures in the Bavarian Army Museum in Ingolstadt. The show was postponed several times due to Corona. But it was opened a few days ago, fortunately, “because it has unintentionally become incredibly topical,” says Ansgar Reiß, the director of the Army Museum. The goal can therefore only be: “We want to help ensure that knowledge about this conflict continues to grow.”
Mayer has traveled to numerous war and crisis countries as well as disaster areas in Africa, Asia and Europe in recent years. As an information delegate for the Red Cross, he looked after things in the Balkans, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Iran, among other places. He experienced the horrors of war often and up close. He was close to the soldiers who fought in these wars, but he always sought to be close to those people who were suffering the consequences of the wars. His photographs not only show the combat operations, the tough fight for survival in kilometer-long trenches and minefields, but also all those other facets that war brings with it. All this is not nice, but the pictures bear witness to the omnipresent misery that is eating its way far into the country from the front. And sometimes even supposedly harmless pages open up, for example when soldiers can be seen doing fitness training in the stage.
“There are pictures that you can’t get rid of.”
Mayer dedicated his own series of pictures, created in 2021, to the female soldiers who are deployed in this war. In a radio interview, Mayer recently told of a friendly young female soldier whom he met in 2018 and who fell from a shell just a few weeks later. “That moved me a lot,” he said, “there are pictures that you can’t get rid of.” From the start of the conflict, Mayer was very often in the towns near the front, where he met and portrayed many people. Some of them have now fallen victim to the war. All the more he brings the civilian population into the picture, the destroyed villages in the Donbas, the mourning over the dead, the people with their faces scarred by war.
What he keeps pointing out: that the rifts and lines of conflict in the Donbas now also run right through families and circles of friends. These are split into the factions pro-Ukrainian and pro-separatist. The trenches tore everything apart, he says. The elderly lived on one side, the children and grandchildren on the other. “It’s an unbearable situation.” In an interview with Bayerischer Rundfunk, Mayer was asked how he coped mentally with this stress. “I’m very lucky,” he said. “I’m only at limited risk and don’t have to worry about losing family members or comrades.”
“The political behavior of the opponents reminds me of the Cold War,” says Reiß. Today it seems like a closed epoch, but that is a mistake. The power blocs used to be an unstable structure, and even now there is nothing to sugarcoat. Photographs like those by Till Mayer, which made the war visible as a cruel reality, are all the more important. For example, the portraits with the blank faces of those who spend days and weeks under constant fire in the trenches and in the shelters. Mayer impressively and movingly documents what takes place in this borderline situation. The exhibition sees itself as a reminder that peace is one of the top priorities of international law. Mayer’s appeal: “We must not let the people of the Donbas down.”
Till Mayer is an editor at the daily newspaper Obermain-Tagblatt employed. As a freelance photographer and journalist, he also works for numerous newspapers and magazines. His photos are shown in exhibitions worldwide. His photo book “Donbas. Europa’s forgotten war” (Bamberg: Erich Weiß Verlag) was published in 2019.
Donbas – War in Europe. Photographs by Till Mayer. Bavarian Army Museum, New Palace Ingolstadt, until June 26 (Tue-Fri 9 a.m.-5.30 p.m., Sat/Sun 10 a.m.-5.30 p.m.)