Photographer Nika Ritshel makes art in the fog of war

DW (English)

With her photos of ballerinas, Ukrainian photographer Nika Ritshel is doing what she can to resist the horrors of war.. She has over 300,000 followers on Instagram.

Transcript

00:00Nearly three years after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war is omnipresent here.

00:09Photographer Nika Richel has to live with this reality too on a daily basis.

00:18She fights back through her art.

00:21My photos deal with life, with young and beautiful people.

00:31The photos can be funny or sad, but they always deal with life.

00:38In a studio in Kiev, Nika photographs ballerinas.

00:43Even before the war, she had discovered them as a subject.

00:47She made her first portrait of a ballerina in 2018, and she was hooked,

00:51exploring the motif even as the war raged outside.

00:57These photos show that we're still alive.

01:02In May 2023, we were going through massive rocket bombardments every day at every time.

01:09We'd be working in this very studio and seeing these fireworks from missiles outside the windows.

01:16We kept on working because nobody can defeat us.

01:25Nika had no thought of fleeing the country when the war broke out.

01:29Instead, she started her Blue and Yellow series with costumes in the Ukrainian national colours.

01:35Nika makes a living from photography, but not from this series.

01:40All the photos from this series are for a good cause.

01:47I tell prospective buyers that 100% of the purchase price goes to a non-profit association.

01:54But I don't decide which one. The model on the photo does.

02:02Now, with Kiev relatively well protected from missile bombardments,

02:07the people of Ukraine's capital are fairly safe.

02:10Even so, they can never really breathe easily.

02:13Some Russian attacks do get through even here.

02:22Often we can't sleep at night because it's just too loud.

02:27We read the telegram channels to see if a drone or missiles are coming in,

02:32and we generally expect that anything could happen any time.

02:36It's a constant feeling of fear for our own lives and for those of our friends and families.

02:45Three years of war have been three years of death and destruction,

02:49mostly in the embattled regions of eastern Ukraine.

02:52Reliable figures for military and civilian deaths may not even exist,

02:56but they reach into the hundreds of thousands.

03:04This is a tragedy for every one of us, but you can't spend every day in mourning.

03:10This invasion has lasted for three years now,

03:14but you can't lie around on the sofa and cry for three years.

03:19This place is a reminder to us all of the cost of this war.

03:26So, Nika keeps working on her photos in the studio.

03:30In War II, life goes on, as does the hope that it will all end well.

03:42I really want to believe that in the end we'll be living in an independent Ukraine,

03:47that we will all be free, that these won't just be empty words,

03:52but that we'll be free from our neighbours and the shadow they cast over us.

04:00Nika works to give herself and others hope through her photos.

04:04Hope for a peaceful future in an independent Ukraine.

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