W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #donaldweber, #interrogations, #power, #ukraine   

Canadian photojournalist Donald Weber first went to Ukraine on assignment during the Orange Revolution of 2004.  Following that first trip, he soon returned and spent the next six years in Russia and Ukraine trying to photograph contemporary life, and its hardships, as well as the vestiges of a still-powerful, hidden system.  

These are about power.  “My study of the gestures of Power invokes the larger question of supposed democratic nations and their vast power to quell the citizenry’s instincts to achieve a more conscious society”.*1  

The Interrogation portraits are all set in a room that has a unreal pinkish glow that begins to look like flesh.  There are a few photographs in the series with an arm or hand or hand with gun violently interrupting the action, but more often the sole person is unresponsive, passive or cowed, not cowering like here.  

This scene is terrifying.  The viewer has no context for the action or any sense of when this took or is taking place.  The gun is scary but as much as anything it is that an arm is pointing dead center into the frame, pinpointing the interviewee.  Even the stripes in the sleeves of the shirt point in.  It is the graphic that is violent.

In photographs, very often it is the threat that is unsettling, not the mayhem itself.

*1 Interview with Jim Casper in “lenscuture”, December 2011

©2021

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