Arthur Bondar is a photographer. But he has other claims to boot.
He feels haunted and thrilled by the millions of negatives of snaps that will have been discarded on rubbish dumps or left decaying == which are forever lost to the world
But he also scores of packages of unprocessed negatives stored floor to ceiling in cardboard boxes in his home in northern Germany. Even if he stopped adding to them, he says these “amount to about 20 to 30 years of work” !! -- reports 'The Guardian', London.
A few years back he had said: “I am in the country that attacks my motherland in a so-called ‘special military operation’, unable to help our relatives who are there under the shells. You can’t even imagine this nightmare – it’s all so illogical. I question if this could truly be reality. This photo is a good reflection of the situation – what is real and what is not?”
Some of his collections
Ukrainian-Russian photojournalist Arthur Bondar has amassed a huge collection of pictures from often unknown photographers
"He bought the images depicting women from the Reichsarbeitsdienst, a female labour force that served the Nazi Reich, from a German seller online. It is the latest addition to a burgeoning collection of about 35,000 negatives from the second world war that the Ukrainian-Russian photojournalist and publisher has been amassing since 2016.
Mostly he only knows what he has bought once he has flattened and scanned the negatives, comparing his purchases to “buying a black cat in a black sack”.
"There’s Nobody Up There" is a joint anti-war project of Ukrainian photographer Arthur Bondar and Russian writer Ksenia Buksha.
The source of the book is Bondar’s unique archive of over fifteen thousand negatives of documentary WWII photographs, from which he selected one hundred photos for the project.
Ksenia Buksha wrote thirty-three accompanying vignettes (including “What War Teaches”) of historical fiction, inspired by historical facts gleaned from her research in WWII archives containing newspapers, diaries, and letters of those who lived and died during the war. (consequenceforum.org)
'The Guardian' article by Kate Connolly says:
"He (Bondar) only buys negatives – taken by either amateur or professional photographers everywhere from the Soviet Union to the United States – to ensure he is getting the most unadulterated images of the war.
“Negatives are photographic truths that make it difficult to distort history. Prints on the other hand might well have been manipulated,” Bondar is quoted as saying -- in reference to the Soviet military practices of “sometimes pasting two images together to create a collage, or cutting dead soldiers out of negatives”.
Bondar smuggled his photographic treasures out of Moscow, where he had been living for over a decade, in eight separate hauls during 2023 – leaving his own photographic archive behind in safe-keeping, “hoping to retrieve it one day”.
He brought them over the border, first to Georgia, and later to Germany, where he and his wife, Oksana, a Ukrainian-Russian artist and photographer from Kharkiv, now live in exile (or self-imposed relocation, as they refer to it).
In doing this he risked at the very least the confiscation of his negatives, a fine and, in the worst case, imprisonment.
Many of the images, despite being legally bought, would probably have been considered by Russian censors to dishonour the “defenders of the fatherland”.
ends
No comments:
Post a Comment