PHOTO STORIES
Anew book by Marc Wilson and Anna Nekrasova-Wilson based around a Ukrainian village has taken on a larger context amid the current war. Peter Dench finds out more
Photographer Marc Wilson explains how it felt to arrive in the remote Ukrainian village where his latest project began: ‘It was a strange feeling… As soon as I arrived, I felt this real need to start making photographs. I work a lot and I take a lot of pictures for my projects, but I don’t take a lot of general photographs when I’m out and about. I don’t snap. I probably don’t take enough family photos when I’m travelling. I like to really care, and the photographs I’ve taken have some meaning. So this strange thing happened when I arrived in this village. It was this incredibly beautiful place. I remember watching village life unfold. I wasn’t certain why or what I was making these images for, but I knew they would be for something.’
The small village Marc describes is Balakliya, located in the Poltava region of central Ukraine, 280km east of the capital Kyiv (there’s another Balikliya further east and one to the south west). Marc first visited Ukraine in late 2018 to produce work for his book, A Wounded Landscape: Bearing Witness to the Holocaust. He collaborated with producer and fixer Anna Nekrasova. They fell in love and became inseparable.
Marc visited Ukraine frequently to be with Anna and they married there in late 2020. They now live in southwest England with their young son.
‘In early 2019 Anna started telling me about this place where her grandmother was from, this village Balakliya,’ says Marc. ‘When I went there for the first time in the summer of 2019, I think her mum was with us and her sister’s kids so it was like an amazing family road trip in a lovely Renault Twingo, from Kyiv to the centre of Ukraine. It was a soft-top car, so kids were hanging out, dogs, the whole lot, passing through this beautiful, peaceful landscape at the time. It was everything Anna had described to me and more, especially for me as I’ve always lived in cities.’
Capturing connections
The images Marc made from his visits to Balakliya from 2019-2021 are simple, beautiful and capture the essence of life and the deep connection to the land. Children swim in the river, families chatter in the shade of fruit trees, livestock idle in the lanes, pickles and preserves are stacked in jars, dusty roads stretch towards green meadows, the light is dappled, pictures fade on dressers, laundry dries in the breeze and sunflowers bow in the field. Then on 24 February 2022, war came. Drones and missiles flew overhead. Of the 360 residents of Balakliya, 49 of them are now fighting on the frontlines. Two are already dead.
Marc and Anna did all
