Homeland, portraiture, the curated self and war

Family photos led my family and I to discover our father's Ukraine homeland and stories of resilience in the face of impending crisis, war and occupied territory I won't be able to visit any time soon.

Andrew Garton
Feb 25, 2025

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My brothers and sisters and I grew up with an old suitcase filled with photos from the old world. Every so often it was pulled out from under our parents bed, carefully opened, each photograph a container for stories.

One by one black and white photos would be picked out and placed on the dining table we’d be sat around. Often our father, occasionally our mother would unpack the stories there, every year a little more would be told. These were mostly cherished photos they had brought with them, migrating to Australia on a work visa as displaced, stateless people, survivors of the second of world wars and many conflagrations that preceded it. On my father’s side, surviving World War Two was only the most recent of wars and persecution they faced and barely survived. These photos were the only remaining physical evidence of their history beyond Australia, beyond even their own memories.

Many of these photos were taken during the mid to late 1940s in and around a displaced persons camp in Austria. Others were twenty or more years older, three or four of them dating back to the 19th century. The oldest were of my Oma’s family, portals into her world, a visual record of her identity and perhaps something of my own. These were portraits of her parents, her sisters, unknown women, girls and boys, and the one that attracted me the most, a family portrait taken circa 1919.

My Oma, Elena Alekseyevna Ustimenko is about 18 years old. She stands behind her mother, Anna Ivanovna and her two sisters, Lidiya on the right and Kseniya on the left. This photo was taken at the height of the civil war that brought down Russia’s dynastic empire whilst laying the foundations for the Soviet Union. Lidiya and Kseniya are playing a strategic naval board game as Anna looks ahead, her face bears the signs of endurance, of her personal losses and what fate has in store for her family. Elena stands behind her, both aware that she and Kseniya will soon flee Lenin’s approaching Red Army obliterating families with complex ties to the collapsed Russian Empire and Ukraine’s turbulent history such as theirs.

We had very few photos of my Opa, Andrey Fedorovic Garton. This one, taken in Novi Sad just as Germany invaded Poland, had its own story to tell. But it would take another eighty years before it revealed its own secrets and when it did, both his and Elena’s photos lead me to Ukraine, first to Crimea and then to its Poltava region.

Both my father’s parents were not only born in Crimea, both had Cossack lineages going all the way back to the 17th century and the formation of an independent Cossack led polity, the Zaporozhian Sich in what is now south-eastern Ukraine.

Elena was born in Sevastopol and Andrey was not born in the former Yugoslavia as we had thought, but in Simferopol. These discoveries were, however, bitter-sweet. Both cities are in Crimea which, since 2014, have been forcibly occupied by Russia. I will not be visiting the homeland of my father’s parents any time soon.

In February 2022, declaring he would “denazify” Ukraine, wannabe Tsar, Vladimir Putin, mobilised his troops along Russia’s border with Ukraine. Eight years prior Russia invaded Crimea and instigated a proxy war in Ukraine’s Donbas region.

This strange, dangerous man joins a lineage of dictators and tsars who, for more than four centuries have claimed Ukraine as Russia’s historical homeland, allegedly saving the country from itself. First Catherine the Great extinguished the Zaporozhian Sich in 1775. Then followed the banning of the Ukraine language in 1876 by Tsar Alexander II and the seizure of Kyiv in 1919 by the Bolsheviks. Stalin’s cruel collectivist program lead to the Holodomor in 1932 when millions of Ukrainians died of famine. If this was not enough, in 1937 Stalin personally signed off on the execution of hundreds of Ukraine’s scientists, teachers, writers and other intellectuals including one of my relatives, Pyotr Kirillovich Nechiporenko.

Three years ago the thought of war in Europe seemed distant and frankly, impossible. Then suddenly... it was not! One hundred and two years after Elena and Andrey fled Ukraine it was brutally attacked by the country whose former Red Army and its increasingly skittish and despotic leadership they feared. Russia mounted an invasion of Ukraine and every shocking threat bearing moment was transmitted on an ever expanding number of social media threads. The Internet was awash with shock, alarm, mayhem, video streams of Russia’s advancing army and Ukraine citizens defending their towns and cities and selfies! A lot of them. Photos would again lead me to my homeland.

As the war intensified, selfies of both Ukraine and Russian soldiers appeared on Twitter, Instagram and Telegram. The war had become personal and individualised. I was looking at faces of men and women forced into battle with one another. These were not the black and white faces of young English, Austrian and Yugoslav combatants long dead I would find in the few dozen photos my parents left Europe with. These were high resolution digital stills of people who only weeks earlier shared selfies of themselves at parties, weddings, on holidays, or at home with their pets. They had taken their curated, social media selves to war. Pets were replaced with machine guns and the latest fashion with flak jackets. Against a background of devastation war was becoming a live, public photo-me-booth.

In April of 2022 photos of another sort emerged. These were of a man with his hands tied behind his back sprawled face down on the pavements and steps leading to some of Moscow's most iconic landmarks.1 Titled Акция “Буча-Москва” (Action “Bucha Moscow”) a Russian performance artist had taken to replicating a photo taken of a Ukraine citizen found tortured on the streets of Bucha, what would become known as massacre of civilians, a war crime perpetrated by the Russian military.2 At that time there was little by way of resistance in Russia to the war taking place in their name. Actions such as this one on the Bridge at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow remain rare. That it was documented at all and shared internationally even rarer still.3

What struck me about this photo and many more like it is how much it reminded me of the internet I knew of former times, an internet that was primarily about coordinating and transmitting physical acts of resistance into the virtual, and how they would spread from one platform to the next, reaching thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, motivating others to do the same or similar. It was how an international ban on rainforest timbers had been mobilised in the late 1980s, how war crimes in Bosnia Herzegovina and torture in East Timor were recorded, transmitted and shook the outside world. This was an era when a photograph, a media release or a call to action would be stir people to action, to organise and participate in any number of international events from protest, to lobbying and embargoes.

Over thirty years before Action “Bucha Moscow” quietly infiltrated social media, a simpler version of the Internet emerged from the firmament of imminent war in the Middle East, the harrowing destruction of ancient forests and fear of a radically changed climate. In the late 1980s through to the early 1990s, no attention-seeking hand-held devices derailed our focus or motivated us to curate our social media selves through violence.

Powerful photographs mobilised protest and international condemnation. These include Napalm Girl, Nick Ut’s 1972 photo of nine year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc running down a street naked after being severely burned by a napalm attack, the Penan forest blockades in Sarawak immortalised in the book and film Blowpipes and Bulldozers, and Jeff Widener’s 1989 photograph of Tank Man, one man with shopping bags confronting a convoy of tanks on Tienanmen Square, China. Would Napalm Girl have the same impact today as it did in 1972?

Today we are saturated with powerful images. But not even the actual photographs of the victims of Russia’s war crimes in Bucha, least of all our lone protester on the streets of Moscow, stirred Russians to protest what continues to be perpetrated in their name. If Ukraine is, as Putin claimed in his February 21 speech, “an inalienable part” of Russia’s “own history, culture and spiritual space” why destroy it? Why rain missiles into apartment buildings, shopping centres, schools, and why brutalise its people? Can Russians not see the crimes, the contradictions? Was “Bucha Moscow” a rare, daring act of protest in a country convinced it should murder its own “spiritual” sisters and brothers? Where is the revolt in Russia itself? Has the wannabe tsar paralysed courage, outrage and dissent?

When 236 Ukrainian refugees arrived in Canada on a special flight from Warsaw in July 2022 they were welcomed by Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the Napalm Girl. Where there is a paucity of revolt in the country perpetrating violence, torture and a war of attrition against its brothers and sisters in Ukraine, there are others the world over who do stand by them.

What else did I learn from my Oma and Opa’s photos?

From the work of courageous and meticulous archivists in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe, we were to discover that Andrey, a multi-instrumentalist, was playing in Dresden when it was bombed by allied forces. In 1950, when giving a reason for ending his employment so suddenly, he wrote ‘FLED’ on an Application for Assistance. Andrey and his new wife were seeking to migrate from Germany to Canada. Elsewhere on the document a US official presiding over displaced persons in Germany writes, Eligibility established.

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It’s Tuesday, 25 February. As I write, three years since the start of the war in Ukraine, peace negotiations are underway, but key discussions exclude Ukrainian representation. The UN General Assembly passes a resolution ‘condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine’. Those voting against the resolution include the US, Russia, North Korea, Israel, Belarus and Hungary. As UN media releases spread across social media, Germany announces a new government. Its newly minted Chancellor Friedrich Merz comes out strong in his support of Ukraine distancing Germany from the US now siding with Russia. Other countries in the EU are expected to follow. At around 3 AM EEST Russia launches two TU-95 long range missiles aimed at Ukraine. Explosions are reported in Kharkiv as “peace negotiations” continue.

Я за Україну

Post by a Ukrainian citizen on BlueSky, 25 February 2025

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Endnotes

1 Unknown performance artist stages multiple 'silent provocations' at Moscow landmarks to protest the Russian military’s massacre of civilians in Bucha, @KevinRothrock/Twitter forwarded from Telegram, 5 April 2022

2 UN report details summary executions of civilians by Russian troops in northern Ukraine, United Nations Media Centre, 7 December 2022 [viewed February 2025]

3 Kishkovsky, S 2022, Russian artist stages protest performance against Bucha massacre, The Art Newspaper, 7 April 2022 [viewed February 2025]