Flashes of War 2022 photo exhibition opened at NUJU

A nation is formed not only based on its language, but also on its history. Therefore, every newly pronounced victor does their best to rewrite history. Instead, the task of journalists is to record the truth as it is! This was emphasized by Associated Press photojournalist / Pulitzer Prize finalist Efrem Lukatsky, who is also a curator of the Flashes of War 2022 photo exhibition, which was opened at the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU) on Monday, December 26.

Efrem Lukatsky is not only the curator, but also the author of most of the works of the exhibition. Photos of Andrii Andriyenko, Serhii Nuzhnenko, Vlada and Kostiantyn Liberovs, Andrii Mariienko, and Roman Chop have also been presented at the exhibition.

“I have been to different wars… Those were “someone else’s wars”, but I knew that everything was fine at home, that we have a peaceful country you can return to and relieve the stress. Now I am in a different position. I look at my Western colleagues who come to us for the war as if on safari. But I see that this is not their war, this is my war…,” says Efrem Lukatsky.

The photo exhibition was organized by the NUJU with the support of the Swedish human rights organization Civil Rights Defenders.

“The key task that the organizers of the exhibition set before themselves was to record the injustice of the war, to show its unbeautified truth. Until recently, the hot spots of the planet were very far from our peaceful country, and Ukrainian journalists went there on distant foreign business trips. But at one point, the world for Ukrainians turned upside down – and now it is enough to say that hot spots appeared in Ukraine – our entire country turned into a “hot spot”, a difficult place for work, a dangerous place for life. Currently, the main vocation of the Ukrainian mass media is to document the terrible crimes committed by the occupiers here. The works presented at the exhibition entitled Flashes of War 2022 vividly demonstrate the high level of skill, drama, and documentary accuracy of the work of our photojournalists,” Sergiy Tomilenko, the President of the NUJU, emphasized when opening the exhibition.

Lina Kushch, the first secretary of the NUJU, noted that the exhibition concentratedly reflects the formation of the Ukrainian nation.

“Some pictures bring tears, some inspire hope, but all of them are imbued with kindness and compassion for people,” Lina Kushch emphasized.

The exhibition presents both well-known photos, a farmer harvesting crops in a field near the front line in Dnipropetrovsk Region (photo by Efrem Lukatsky), the gutted remains of Russian machinery in Bucha (photo by Serhii Nuzhnenko), as well as vivid photographic works made in recent months.

NUJU Information Service

Photo by Andrii Nesterenko