I met with Romanian photojournalist Vadim Ghirda to talk about war photography. We had no choice but to talk about everything. About good and evil, disillusionment and hope, beauty and fear. About journalism and its increasingly complicated relationship with the truth, about the unsung heroes who make the work of war correspondents possible – fixers, local journalists, translators, drivers. About the baggage of suffering he has collected in the 34 years he has spent witnessing conflicts all over the world.

A relevant selection of photographs by Vadim Ghirda will be exhibited, together with images from the war in Ukraine by photographer Larisa Kalik, as part of the FRONT exhibition. The exhibition is designed by Scena9 and will open on Friday, February 23, at Rezidența9.

We met on a sunny day, at a Bucharest terrace. A bird could be heard chirping, we were drinking lemonade, and, from time to time, Vadim reminded me how lucky we both are to be here, in one piece, and how fragile our reality, which could come crashing down at any time, is.

Vadim Ghirda was 19 years old in 1990, when he was hired as a photojournalist for the Associated Press (AP) agency, after documenting the miners’ riots in Bucharest. That’s when he first saw a man die beside him. That same year, loaded with photographic equipment, he boarded the train to travel to the war in the Moldovan separatist republic in Transnistria. Since then, he covered the war in Yugoslavia and all its repercussions for six years, the Israel- Palestine war, the war in Iraq and other massacres scattered across the map of the world. He has been photographing the war in Ukraine since 2014. He has won many awards for his work, including World Press Photo in 2017, the Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents in 2022, and in 2023 the Pictures of the Year International, as well as the Pulitzer for Breaking News photography, together with the AP team. Vadim's award-winning photograph shows corpses lying on the ground in a yard in the small Ukrainian town of Bucha, following a civilian massacre committed by the Russians.

When I started working in the press, also at the age of 19, it seemed to me that there was no way I would ever end up doing as good a job as the photographers I followed and worked side by side with, in the editorial office of a newspaper. We shared the tiny spaces there under the camera lenses, from behind which we would occasionally hear, „PHOTO, DOWN!”. Out of all my colleagues, most of them men, Vadim was the most intimidating. I mean, not him personally, but everything I knew about him and his work in conflict zones. When I met him, I was a little shocked, because he did not fit the war photographer stereotypes at all, something he also talks about in the interview below. He seemed very gentle, shy and modest, spoke softly, and took up very little space. Since then, he has continued to do extraordinary work with that same modesty.

In the most difficult situations, in which I would lie down on the floor and cry, he creates perfect, surgically precise, resplendent compositions.

I think it's important to have beautiful images taken in humanity's ugliest situations. As I prepared the FRONT exhibition and spent a lot of time looking at his photos, I understood that this is their superpower: through their beauty they haunt you and become impossible to ignore. They are the visual correspondent of the most disturbing act in an opera, that splendid music sung by a character who tells you that all has been lost.

Vadim Ghirda knows exactly what we are made of. He is a kind of biologist with an artist's eye, sent out into the world to find out how we, as a species, react in conditions of extreme crisis. The more I look at his photos, the more I feel that he has looked deep into us, to our essence, where all the best and worst comes out. I was very happy when he agreed to meet on a sunny day, for this long and dense dialogue, which I have edited for clarity.

How did you contract the photography virus? Your mother worked as a photo editor for [the Romanian state-run press agency] Agerpres, right?

Yes, when I started out, my mother worked there. I used to idle about in the newsroom, so that I wouldn't be left home alone. I loved the cameras and they were everywhere.

I also worked for Agerpres, as an unskilled worker, for part of the year 1989, because I didn't get into college. I was washing some teleprinters with gasoline, I was constantly covered in gasoline and ink. My mother either couldn't or didn't want to hire me into the photo department. But I used to play with cameras ever since childhood, I liked them. Later, I started taking portraits of my classmates at school. I would also borrow a camera and print them with the enlarger. I liked portraits, I liked this voodoo of film photography – it seemed, and still seems to me, magical, but for someone tormented by shyness and sociopathy, for me it was also a form of being accepted by a group.

Because photography is this voodoo, and because it touches man's greatest weakness – the ego and self-love –, if you took a beautiful portrait of someone, their self-love would also extend to you. They liked themselves in the picture, but you were the one selling them the drug. We're junkies too, but we're also dealers.

It was complicated, because, back then, you couldn’t find films all over the place, and besides, at parties I was terrified that a girl would ask me to dance, because I can't dance. It's like with awards: I would’ve liked to, but I was also afraid. So at parties I had one job, I was hiding behind that thing, and that feeling of comfort still protects me to this day, right here. When I bring the camera to my eye, it’s not that I dehumanize myself, but I get rid of the fear.

In Ukraine it was very difficult for me, because I worked with very young people, Ukrainian journalists and fixers, most of whom, because of their sheer youth, had not worked in conflict zones before. On the one hand, this made my life very beautiful, because they were completely non-blasé and so I also did extra things along with them, while also being fueled by their energy. But it was also extremely difficult for me, because this animalic fear that you mention, which I have and which the camera solves, is not solved for others as well. These kids went all over the place and I lived in deep terror that someone might get hurt or we might lose someone because they took me somewhere.

I have adapted to this life to the point that even here I don't feel comfortable if I walk on the grass. I don't want to sound like in the movies, I find that kind of thing horrific, but if I look around I don't see things that people normally see. If I walk on the grass in the park I have to think to myself at some point, ‘we’re in Bucharest, right? You can walk on the grass at will, there aren’t any mines here.’ They did not know this, and they believed that the experience they had accumulated in the war, since the frontlines had been set up in Crimea, was enough. They were trampling around like goats, to and fro, in places where five tanks had just been destroyed. I was trying to keep to the road. There was hot, unstable ammunition there.

The amount of mistakes you can make there, which can end in tragedy, is infinite and from that point of view it was difficult for me. I was living in constant terror that someone would make a wrong move and I wouldn't notice in time.

What has changed since you started working? The technique has changed enormously. And trust in photography, in journalism in general?

The first and worst thing is that trust in what you see has dropped dramatically. That should be sacred.

In 1990, when I first went to a conflict zone, to the war in Transnistria, it was surreal in many ways.

At the time, I went off by myself in an entire sleeping compartment filled with typewriters, adhesive paper, photographic paper, tons of chemicals for treating the paper, enlargers, films, developer heaters, etc.. I carried all this stuff that you had to install somewhere. You would tape off a bathroom and set up your lab there. There was no grounding, it wouldn't start, the developer only developed 12 films, and you could only put in four at a time, so you had to be very careful, because you didn't have tons of developer, you didn't have millions of photo papers. You would zoom in and put a small piece of paper onto the area you were interested in, to make a test exposure. It was nerve racking and you wound up with, say, four pictures. You typed a text that you pasted onto the picture, and you had a tambour thing, a kind of ancestor of the fax machine, the sound of which I can still hear today. It was a transmitter, and it used this head, sort of a light scanner, on this spinning tambour with the picture, and it would send it to the newsroom. Submitting a color photo took 24 minutes. And then you would call and see that the phone line had been cut off during one of the separations, and sometimes you would be stuck sending four pictures for six hours.

I now shoot 300 pictures at some lame press conference, and I pick two and I'm miserable. 300 images = ten rolls of film. Ten rolls of film would have lasted me two weeks, normally. And you know what the irony is? I wasn't taking fewer good pictures then, I had a longer thought process before I clicked. It seems to me that now a lot of people, especially us older ones, suffer because the access to cameras has been democratized, that people who don't necessarily have the mechanical skills or the necessary technical knowledge, can take pictures. Now everyone takes pictures. I am glad that this is the case, because photos are not about mechanical skills, about cameras, machines and chemicals. Photos are that guy’s soul.

What is the actual pace in the field? What does your daily life look like there, in the conflict zones?

Two weeks can go by and you see nothing, do nothing, sit and drink lemonade, like we’re doing right now, in the happy scenario that there is lemonade there, and get frustrated that others are doing stuff, and you aren't, you don’t have access, you can't manage, you don't get through. Those are very dangerous times, because you will want to do something at all costs. You’re out on that road thinking “I know it's risky, but I haven't done anything in so long, and I've seen it done by I don't know who, who works for our competitor. Let us go too, what’s the worst that can happen?” And then the worst happens. 

Or you end up in a situation where you decide to bend the truth, to stray from it, because that will make for a better photo. And you say, “Couldn’t you go out and pretend to shoot a little?” I saw this happen. Aside from the main point that, obviously, whatever you make someone do goes against the very idea of ​​photojournalism. When you make someone pose for a portrait it's ok, I'll mention it in the photo caption: “Ioana is posing for a portrait.” But it's a whole different thing if I tell you, “Ioana, wouldn't you like to go over there and throw this glass at the people sitting at the table next to us? I think that would make for more of an action picture.” There are people who do that. In former totalitarian countries, there were photographers that I really can't name, who were masters of staging. The problem is that the moment you fire a shot across the front line, in order to get an action photo or capture sound on video, someone on the other side will respond in kind. If you shoot, they will shoot back. We must understand that bullets do eventually fall to the ground, even if they were fired into the air, and that all actions have consequences. Whether it's a lack of experience or of a backbone, ethics, or pressure, that you think you didn't do the right thing, all of these can lead you to bend the rules a little. That's the ugly part, let’s say, where you deviate drastically from ethics.

But you can also just deviate from the safety measures. We know we didn't drive down that road because it has an exposed section, where we can wind up being shot at, out of boredom. The other side gets bored, too. Everyone gets bored.

War is an alternation of crushing idle time of waiting in bad conditions, with very short bursts of total carnage. And, during that period of boredom, a car with journalists passes by.

Many things happen. I can be frustrated, I can think to myself, “Would you look at these guys, they're driving around freely, they go drink lemonade, and I have to sit in this ditch, soaking wet, waiting for someone to kill me. I'm human, I'm not well. Why do I have to suffer this fate, while the people in that car are fine and dandy, and they also become famous thanks to the pictures they take of me?”

Another thing to note – time is very short. When I absolutely accidentally found those executed people whom I photographed in Bucha, with the help of a Ukrainian colleague who talked to some people on the street, I was not 100% sure that the area had been cleared of Russians. If you look at the camera timestamp from the first to the last click, I think it's seven minutes. Seven minutes during which we photographed non-stop – we took wide shots, of the context, of the building, the buildings next door, in order to understand, to see the scale of things. I shot details. I was careful not to step on something, careful that my colleague doesn’t step on something. I paid attention to everything all at once. And there are dead people, nine folks lying on the ground, and if I look at their faces, they're half my age. Do you understand?

Has the state you go into when you're in these situations changed? Do you feel different now from when you were 18, when you first came into contact with that kind of death and mayhem? Has the chemistry changed for you, in terms of focus, fear, vigilance?

Quite a bit. I can say that I've developed some unfortunate immunity to this stuff, but it's not all encompassing. I was visiting a school and someone asked me if I would recommend them to go into this line of work. If you don't experience this thing as a disease, in the good sense of the word, as a vice, don't do it – because it's pointless. It's still that way for me. I carry these cameras with me all the time, not for the look, especially since it's become hard for me to carry them on my back, so I wear them around my waist and I look like a local cop who’s come over for coffee. But if I see something beautiful and can't photograph it, I get terribly sad. It seems to me that there is a minimum of return which I can offer fate in exchange. If I see something, it haunts me for years. It happens when I don’t take the photo, as well as when I do – that I didn't do well. It pathologically haunts me. I know that you understand this, but I don't know how anyone living outside our disease would read these things. It's a lose-lose situation, somehow. You witness some extraordinarily intense things and then, when you get home, you think to yourself: “I witnessed something miraculous, something extreme, and that's the best I could do, these are the pictures that came out of it? None of them show what I saw there.” This is a source of self-destruction, I keep thinking: “I had the chance to be here, to witness this thing, and all I could do with it was this boring thing. Nothing makes sense!”

How do you work in the field? What role do fixers, local journalists, drivers, etc. play in this work?

People at home have no idea how many people contribute to the photographer getting to take the pictures they see. The photographer alone receives their appreciation.

Let's say we were on top of the Intercontinental Hotel and we saw smoke in the distance, next to Casa Poporului. How do we reach that fire?

The driver I worked with in Gaza could see the smoke in the distance, would drive down winding streets without GPS, and we’d arrive at the scene at the same time as the fire truck. That man was never credited for his work, but without him I wouldn't have taken even 10% of the photos I took there. The right thing to do would be to credit their work should be credited, their skills are invaluable. An essential luxury at an organization with a large infrastructure, such as the Associated Press, is that they recruit locals, who assist journalists from other countries in their fieldwork.

I worked with a driver in Ukraine who quickly made friends with people everywhere. He was also a driver, a translator, and a fixer. People don't trust you. Even in our country, where there is no war, it takes someone time to understand why a car has stopped in front of their house and two people got out of the car taking pictures. It’s extremely important to be accompanied by someone who can quickly explain the situation and gain their trust.

Sometimes, when I look at my pictures and am dissatisfied, I also forget that, in reality, you spend very little time in one place, you can't stick around to do something in depth. Sometimes you have a quarter of an hour there, during which you have to secure your access. That's what these people do for you. It's extremely important work and I don't know why it's not signed. It’s ‘life and death,’ they point out things you should pay attention to. Their contribution is at least half of the work.

I have even heard photographers tell others in their line of work – that is, people who know what they are talking about – stories that make it seem like they were alone in the field and that the photos they took are 100% their personal success. Everything that involves the army, for instance, is impossible to do outside a very complex process of accreditation and verification. You don't just go to the place where explosions are heard from and walk in. You would die. You can't just show up and be there without a very complicated process of getting approved. Of course, it's important to be able to show who you are, that you have a certain background, and the media organization you work for is also very important. That's kind of unfair to a freelancer who might be amazing, perhaps ten times better than you as a photographer.

Whenever the army takes you somewhere, it is responsible for you. In taking the decision to take that risk, they choose the journalist with the larger audience. But this doesn't mean that you have to transfer that credit to yourself, that you're there because you're the best. The publication plays a very large role in the access you receive, and very importantly, there are some awfully high costs. The protective gear, the hotel, the car, I don't even know how to calculate them, but it's a staggering amount of money per day that you'd have to cover just to be there.

I think the photographer’s condition there is very bizarre, you’re kind of an extra, a witness, yet also a participant. You’re behind the camera, but you can also intervene.

Yes, you are always an extra.

Every night, I would go back to a hotel and take a hot shower. I have never taken a cold shower in Ukraine, and I take a lot of them in Bucharest, because the hot water in the apartment building isn’t running. I was constantly thinking – look, these people now sleep in damp cellars, on their sacks of rotten potatoes, and I come here, eat, shower, sleep in a bed, and tomorrow I come back again like I’m going to the movies.

Although everything we do is deeply subjective, to the extent that you know what your role is there, you present a moment in time. It seems to me that visual journalism is a language that has the gift to cross all the barriers that apparently exist between us – both cultural and linguistic. It's a direct language, which anyone can understand, it comes in through the eyes and goes to the head and heart. Anything visual arouses emotion, reflection. It helps you be transported there, without putting yourself at risk, and helps you think objectively about what you saw, which one can't necessarily do when they’re on the ground.

Obviously people think ‘He took this picture of the right side, but maybe on the left there was something else, which would have changed our perception. This can be a very sad scene, but maybe what we don't see in the photo is that there is a film crew on the left and, in fact, the sad scene is populated by actors.’ This is where we get to the quality of each individual agent, because filters and rules, no matter how well designed, have their limitations. After all, I'm on my own out here. My editor can ask me a whole bunch of questions, but they can't check what was going on on the left side. This is where one’s individual quality and ethics are essential.

I can choose to show a very tight image that I consider suggestive, for example one of the people who had been executed in Bucha (editor’s note: a site of civilian executions committed by the Russian army in Ukraine in 2022) had his hands tied taped behind his back. I didn't even realize it on the spot. A lot of times I'm so scared and in such a hurry that I work with what I want in mind, and then I find that a certain framing would be visually stronger. I did, for example, a close framing of his hands, which had something of the texture and color of a classical Dutch painting. It's awful, that was a real man, who had been alive a few days before, and now in comes some guy to say, ‘Ah, interesting, your atrophied hands look like a painting, let me take a nice picture and brag about it.’ It’s not about this. It's about isolating a detail that can relay the drama of that situation in a single frame, so you can communicate it better. I consider these photos to be a kind of spokesperson for the material shot there. But I also do forensic, or police-like, crime scene photography. 

You have to think that what you do there is not only to inform the next day's news. Photographs can become elements that later reconstruct the puzzle of a historical event, and can also be evidence of war crimes.The other voodoo thing that photography does, which I really like, is that it's the only activity that stops time. You can't stop time for yourself, but you can do it for what's around you. The people in the portraits will live forever and their energy will travel to other people even in a thousand years’ time – that is, if the planet will still exist. It's an amazing tool: you create a cross-section of reality, like an insect that has been frozen in amber for millions of years.

It has happened to me, and this is where ethics comes in – it’s a matter of when you intervene and how. There was a man who had fled Syria and crossed into Turkey and he was desperate to tell the world what the Syrian regime was doing in his village. He said he wanted to be interviewed without covering his face with a scarf – this while, in some situations, even the interviewees’ voices are distorted to protect their identity. But this man was young, intensely emotional, and he said, ‘No, I must be brave, I have to take it upon myself,’ and so on. I remember I was with a colleague who asked him ‘Do you still have family in that village?’ And he said, ‘Yes, there are lots of them left there.’ We decided we couldn't do the interview. Someone told me, when he heard this story, that we censored him, that it had been his choice, that he had decided to speak. I could be judged for intervening, for setting things up, for making him cover his face. I'm ok with that. This is like the difference between the letter and the spirit of the law. I want to sleep well at night, I don’t want to endanger someone because I inadvertently left out a detail, or because I wanted to get an exclusive scoop.

Why should we believe the things we see coming in from the battlefield? Why are we becoming increasingly skeptical now, when there is more access to information than at any other point in human history?

Now that trust in the press has completely disappeared – it's already an archaic concept –, a lot of people ask me how I avoid fake news from these conflict zones. The answer is quite complicated, but it’s important to have sources that you know are very serious, at least in terms of intentions and procedures. At AP, for example, they wouldn't afford to send a man into the field who they don't trust will do everything in his power to be correct. Anyone can make a mistake, even without bad intent. It’s a very procedural process, with many stages of analysis. Even if we've seen a scene, we don't rush to say that things are black or white until we go through all the checks. There are many editorial filters, you get asked a lot of questions, so that the editors are sure you can answer any question that someone who sees or reads the material might ask.

From my point of view, the most serious effect of fake news is not that some people end up believing a lie; obviously that's a problem, but the fundamental effect is that people with good intentions who want to be informed end up withdrawing, they stop participating. When people of good faith are bombarded with all these things that always turn out to be something other than what they initially seem, they end up in the non-believer group. They don't want to be part of an injustice because they read a lie, so they mind their own business and don't get involved. And when all those who would like to be fair lose hope and end up believing in nothing, who do you think takes advantage of this?

I’ve heard it all, from ‘you were a victim of propaganda’ to ‘those weren't real people, they were mannequins.’ I've gotten used to this contemporary madness, to the point that if the lady at the next table would tell me something like that, I'd think she has her reasons for harboring that level of doubt. But if you, who have known me for so long, came to tell me this, it would be more complicated. There were people who have known me for 25 years who told me that the Bucha scene I photographed was not true. Some in a benign way, that it was actually a staging by the Ukrainians, and I fell into the trap of propaganda. Let's face it, this is not out of the question. Things like that happen at war, where one of the parties to the conflict will bomb their own people to get a supportive effect. For example, in Bosnia there were two days of truce in Sarajevo, where people went to the market and so on, and on one of those days there was a mortar attack on a market, which killed a lot of civilians who had come there to do their shopping. At the time, it was said that the enemy had bombed the city, and this accelerated the international diplomatic process of sanctions against the Serbian side, which was accused of war crimes and truce violations. Later, an investigation revealed that the shot was fired from a position belonging to the other side. I don't think a clear conclusion was ever reached, these things often stay that way. But the point is that it can happen, and even stagings can happen. But we have the tools. After we took those photos in Bucha, we spent another 4-5 days conducting unarranged interviews – that is, we went into people’s houses unannounced, and we talked to the people through a good translator, trying to find out everyone's story. Then you identify the elements found in more than one story, the people who only heard about it from gossip, the people who actually saw it. That's how you can tell. Let’s absurdly suppose that someone came and placed those bodies there, after stealing them from a morgue. There was no way they were going to do that and then talk to everyone within a two mile radius and tell them, “Watch out, Vadim will come ask you about it, you tell him this and that.” And we weren't the only journalists doing this there. So, the moment we make a statement, it has been verified as much as is humanly possible, through nearly forensic methods, deep within the realm of investigative journalism.

It’s very well said that the first victim of war is the truth. I don't know who said it, but that's the way it is. There are people who lie knowingly, because they are pursuing a goal. But there is also unintentional lying, in the case of traumatic events. Let's say that, as we’re sitting here now, a bomb drops over there, or some people come in and shoot the folks sitting at other tables. We survive, then someone comes and asks us what we saw. You will see that we’ll have different versions of the events, even if we were sat side by side and we’re in the category of people who don’t want to lie about what they saw. It's simply the shock, our reaction to the shock, how much our brain froze, what left a mark on us. Tomorrow you won't remember it, you'll ask yourself if it really happened that way. It's really hard, people will say some horrible things, but that doesn't mean they're lying. It's very complicated to sift through all that stuff to figure out what it was like, in the absence of a record. We don't process these things with a clear mind, but through our emotions. Everyone has their own truth. The hard task is to find a happy medium, and it's sometimes an overwhelming responsibility to know that you've gone through everything possible to get to that happy medium and deliver it to someone. From this point onwards, I’m only referring to people of good faith, not those with an agenda.

What do you feel is specific to the war in Ukraine?

In reality, all wars are equally terrible. In Bosnia there were entire cities wiped off the face of the Earth, but I don't think that even there was such a huge number of people being pushed to their death. In Bakhmut, for example, every day you’d read that the Russians are sending soldiers to certain death, in battles where hundreds would be killed, in order for them to advance by 30 meters. Somehow, I didn't expect that. From the Russian side of the front I have yet to see a photo, I think they grant access.

I'm so utopian in my optimism that I didn't expect this war to start, I didn't believe it for a second. I had already been there for a month, because there was all that flexing going on, and because photographers who work there are on a constant rotation to cover these areas. There were two of them in Ukraine who couldn't work around the clock, so we’d go there by rotation. It seemed like things were escalating, but I'm telling you, I thought with all my heart that this couldn't happen in 2022.

You hear this a lot, and it's irritating, that you can't do something like that in Europe, as if we're living in the good part of the world here, whereas in Africa it's okay. In fact, the idea that in the 21^st century, anywhere in the world, things could end up being solved by killing thousands of people, putting hundreds of thousands of people into conflict, strikes me as the most anachronistic thing possible. The fact that you can't solve a dispute nowadays through talking seems sci-fi to me. The people around me were saying that the Russians were getting ready, that there were more and more of them, but I was thinking, ‘Gee, who knows, maybe that's how they try to negotiate, in a more macho way, by showing that they have more toys, before they get to a discussion.’ Until the last moment I was sure that such a thing could not happen.

Once the war starts like this, it's utopian to imagine that it's going to be fair play. Unfortunately, international conventions that, in theory, prevent and condemn war crimes and attacks against civilians, have a very small real-time impact. Maybe nowadays, with the universal and efficient distribution of information, with surveillance cameras everywhere, people will get it into their heads that they can be seen doing these things.

War crimes are committed by people like you and me. You don't want to know what a man can do if you put a gun in his hand and release him of legal and social responsibility. Then, even you get to find out what you’re made of. Unfortunately, for people who might be serial killers in civilian situations, but don't dare to act, out of fear of the law, an environment like that is heaven on earth. The civil equivalent is if you get a large windfall of money, or you hold a position that leads you to believe you are above the law. Another very dangerous situation is when you feel you have nothing left to lose. At war, there is an extraordinarily explosive combination of all these things. And you can't judge if you haven't been in that situation. People think ‘no one will know what I'm doing’ and that this excuse – I was in the army, it was the enemy –, allows them to do anything.

International law obviously punishes these things, but it needs evidence. And after you prove it, you have to be able to get your hands on those people who did it. These are all subsequent processes that do not protect the people when the army enters their village. Maybe now, with this massive dynamic of information, people will think twice before engaging in an act of gratuitous, unforced violence.

We [Editor’s note: photojournalists in conflict zones] must be careful to not be political at all. This is specific to all wars. Once you're in the army, you have to do everything you're told, because otherwise you get killed. It's a mix of dead-end situations that are very difficult to navigate. In the Red Army there were some battalions called anti-withdrawal: if you didn't go forward, they would shoot you. You had a choice: go forward and maybe escape, or go back and be shot by your own people; or, if they didn't shoot you, you were going to suffer consequences for betrayal. If anyone feels their choice is between killing you or dying themselves, they will generally choose the first option. Even if they’re just afraid, that's where they end up.

When you touch on these sensibilities, your back gets put up against the wall for taking sides. I photographed dead Russian soldiers and saw people commenting, ‘good on them, look, the Russky’s dead.’ No one is debating the correctness or incorrectness of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but it’s a long way from that to the actual person who has died. They’re also human, they can't be identified with Putin. It's easy to say they should’ve just said no, refused to go, not touch the weapon. Yes, in principle I agree, he should’ve said no. But would you be willing to face the cost of that refusal?

You also have to put yourself in the shoes of the combatants – generally, they are very, very young people, and, aside from the ideological motivation, let’s call it, which is very strong for Ukrainians, there is also a lot of fear.

You wind up fighting for various reasons. Perhaps you thought signing up to the army would get you a steady job. I don't think anyone joins the military thinking they're going to end up in a trench with water up to their waists and have to either kill strangers or die. People join the army because they want to live better, not die. I spoke to a Ukrainian guy who had studied physics and couldn't get a job right away, he had a wife and a small child, and he thought he'd go into the army for four years, improve his life a little, until they got their footing and be able to afford a house and so on. And now he was here.

The scale of patriotic reactions – healthily patriotic, not scary nationalist, of which we see more and more in today’s world – that I’ve seen in Ukraine is touching. I’ve seen rational patriotism in many situations. Not some irrational people who want to kill or derive some sort of satisfaction from the idea of ​​confrontation.

Why, after seeing so many wars, did you think there couldn't be one more?

Starting with World War I, when the level of documentation increased to the point that people saw what these things meant, we now know so much about wars that you would think they could never happen again.

The war in Ukraine is now being compared to World War I, because of this fighting in the trenches and these minimal advances, where to make your way from here to that fence costs 5.000 lives. World War II came a few years after the first, not 100 years later, to say that people had managed to forget. It started immediately, so there clearly wasn’t much room for optimism.

But despite the statistics, because they don't help much when it comes to war, I still maintain hope like a utopian. If enough people stop believing, it's all over. If you no longer believe, you end up living in a very ugly world, and you’re contributing to its ugliness. You go to bed and wake up to this unnecessary poison. And wars are the biggest poison – entire generations carry that hatred, that baggage, the loss of the people they loved. You can't imagine that I come over, burn down your house and kill your family, you kill mine, and then a line is drawn, or that line is erased, and suddenly we all calm down. Three thousand people die, in order for us to advance to Piața Romană [Editor’s note: in downtown Bucharest], and then, after some negotiations, the land we won is returned to the others, so that we, in turn, can grab a piece of Piața Unirii. Someone comes and tells you, ‘Ok, Ioana, Vadim killed your whole family, but starting tomorrow you get to be friends.’

I went through a phase where I thought I was being interesting if I said that bad things don't surprise me anymore. It often seems that if you expect the worst, you don't suffer anymore. In reality, it was foolish, because if you really stop believing, all is lost.

What is the role of photography in this seemingly hopeless situation? Much has been written about it, but usually from the theoretical perspective of people who were not on the front lines. What is your perspective?

The question always comes up, whether photographs can lead to the avoidance of future wars. No, photos alone can't do that. They do have their role – people see, they can understand what war looks like. After all, if a large enough mass of people objected, we couldn't be ignored.

All sorts of groups have sprung up that idolize conflict – I've seen T-shirts that say LOVE THE TRENCH. This is hard for me to understand. I don’t think anyone in their right mind could look at a terrible photograph from the war and say, ‘Yes, guys, come on, it's good, come on, let's do it again.’ 

That's why I want to believe. To be clear, it's hard, it's easier said than done. But I think it is mandatory to believe, because otherwise we will inevitably suffer the consequences. If that well meaning majority exists, no leader will ever be able to take you to war, they will not be put in a position from which he can actually take you to war. It sounds like an incredibly long project, but I think it’s a solution.

Gaza is also a situation with no end in sight. Violence will never end a conflict, violence is not a lasting solution to anything. A solution imposed by force will never solve the conflict. Don't think I’m an oasis of optimism. I say these things to hear myself saying them too.

What does the mind of someone who has seen so much death look like? Do you have access to therapy, treatment for PTSD? What are the problems you face? How do you feel all this has changed you? After everything you've seen, don't you sometimes feel like dropping off the face of the Earth?

I do.You are exposed to people's infinite willingness to do evil. It literally takes away your will to live, and above all it takes away your ability to believe in people.

There are no good effects, I'm not someone who’s cheerful, balanced, or reconciled. It's happened to me many times, after great dangers – I felt like, ‘that's it, if I get out of here, I'll never be angry again.’ But then I leave and the next day I get upset over something stupid. We are generally plagued by the past, the future, and the illusion of control. We don't know how to use the one thing we do have, the present.

First of all, to get help you have to admit that you need help, which I didn't do from the start. I was never driven by a macho nature. But I was probably a bit like that to myself, actually. I denied my emotions, somewhere along the way I kind of made my own crown out of absorbing suffering without showing it, or talking about how I feel. I don't think I've ever been one of those people who think if you talk to a psychologist it means you're crazy and the neighbors will laugh at you, but I admit I did harbor a certain mistrust.

The organization does give you access to stuff like that, you also have access to it on your own, but you have to be open.

The second problem is that of the ego. A group identity is formed, which is very dangerous. I've tried to talk about it before, to those who think they might like to do this job. When you’re a war correspondent, you risk ending up feeling like you belong to a special professional and human category. And at first I did this for the wrong reasons.

When I started doing this job, I was very young, and things were happening around me here in Romania; they weren’t as atrocious as what I'm experiencing now, but they were disturbing enough. June 13, 1990 was the first time I saw a man die next to me. Man is an extraordinary being, but his software comes with some flaws that almost ruin all his charm. He's one of those creatures who don't feel comfortable unless they feel cooler than the person next to them. I noticed that the idea that we are the same thing, that we are equal, that we have the same feelings, creates great discomfort.

This is one of the jobs that give you the impression that you’re smarter than others. I'm sure I went through this phase myself. It embarrasses me to think about it, but one the few things I can be proud of is that I recovered quite quickly. I will admit that I was helped by some colleagues who displayed this exacerbated symptom; plus, you realize what an aberration it is to turn other people's suffering into the imaginary mini-pedestal on which you stand. I think this is a risk with journalism in general, because we cover a very wide spectrum of existences and environments, one day we’re in the most troubled place and the next we’re sitting next to the presidents. I think that, in fact, the conclusion should lead you in the opposite direction. You realize that when you’re in Parliament, alongside a supposed elite, as well as when you’re at the opposite end of the spectrum, people are, in fact, the same.

This phenomenal access we get is, if you ask me, the main drug that keeps us in this business. You have access to a million lives, to a million universes, to people's emotions. It's like reading a hundred books every day. I actually kind of agree a little with those who think that when you take someone’s photo, you steal their soul. They give it to you, and that thing goes into you, it's an exchange that enriches you.

A term that irritates me when I hear it on TV is ‘a simple man,’ or ‘ordinary people.’ Ordinary, as opposed to us, the special ones. All these ordinary people are afraid of the press. This combination of access, the feeling that you are superior, and the fact that you see people being afraid of you, can lead you to develop a God syndrome.

I was always restrained in my reactions, for fear of ridicule, and I saw others in my line of work flexing apocalyptically, based on stuff they’d greatly embellished, or that hadn’t even happened, sometimes in front of me. I, out of misplaced elegance, said nothing. This is how I decided what I didn't want to be. It wasn't because I took some great intellectual leap. It freed me, otherwise I might have spent some more years suffering from this disease, ‘cause I was very young. At some point, you no longer realize that you’re getting carried away.

Some girl will look at you all emotional, worshiping you, ‘Wow, this guy has done so much, he’s suffered so much.’ It gets tricky – you start to like people based on how much they admire you. It's important to not like yourself in this pathological way, to pretend that you have feelings for people, when in fact you have those feelings for yourself. At some point, no matter how many stories you can tell, no matter how much you improve on them, reinvent them, you still run out of them. And from that moment on, you have to live in the present with that person, and it gets complicated. Because you now believe that people must stand to attention when you speak. And if you find that they’re not giving you those smitten looks anymore, suddenly you don't like them anymore. I did suffer a lot, but I also understood some things, some of them a little bit late. The reality is that living in the present is very complicated.

Look, we’re sitting on this terrace and we’re feeling good, and we can stay here for as long as we want, and we don't have to worry that a bomb might fall on it. This is an extraordinary luxury. The alarm isn’t sounding, stuff isn’t falling down on us without the alarm sounding, to have to find out that these people, who were just having coffee, have turned into a mixture of remains. If we thought about this, we’d be much more grateful.

Do you have war flashbacks when you're back home?

Yes, I do. But I don't want to feel sorry for myself, this is another remainder of Balkan machismo. One thing this job takes away from you: it severely affects your ability to live in the moment, because things come into your mind, even though you don’t want them to. Not like in the movies, where the hero sees tanks, but like what I just talked about – I look at this terrace and know what it would look like if there was an attack, if something exploded.

Another problem when you come back, perhaps the biggest one, is the disconnect you feel because you can no longer correctly relate to other people's problems, to the problems of normal existence. Sometimes I feel like I can't connect to real life, to the present. It's a super treacherous poison in close relationships. Even after you get past that initial part I talked about, where you feel like a hero, like you’re better than the others, let's say you've overcome the risk of the pedestal, you unwittingly tend to apply an unfair scale to normal human problems. The most rudimentary example is that of a child: if his balloon pops, he’s devastated, and you have to understand that he is completely right. You can't tell him, ‘My boy, do you know that children are starving somewhere else in the world?’ But unwittingly, that's what you do when you come back. 

Your mother or your friend, let's say, has a problem that seems prosaic to you, when you come back from there. At best, you ignore them and they sense this. The weight of the planet’s problems rests on your shoulders, and someone close to you is upset that they crashed their car. The reality is that this type of disconnect ruins your relationship with people, and the bad news is that people are right to ruin their relationship with you. Ok, you went to the front, but I’m not the one who sent you there, so why should I be on the receiving end of these things? Of course, in close relationships there is understanding, a partner can know that I'm not ignoring them because I'm the devil, I'm ignoring them because these are the limitations of my mind at that moment. Unfortunately, the mind, which is in theory the most powerful tool we have, is also our weakest point. It's an entity where all kinds of crap can get in if you're not careful, and you can't control it. It is very difficult to understand that the mind must be kept under observation, like a pet, lest it go mad. It develops some tricky habits. And sometimes it seems like an entity independent of you, pushing you to do crap.

What do you think about the concept of absolute reality in photojournalism? The idea that you return from the field with photographs that contain the objective truth has been much debated throughout the history of photography, especially in recent years. 

I think absolutely everything we do is subjective. We could talk endlessly on this topic. I think that photography, for the press, for whatever purpose, is a subjective thing. It is your soul who sees. The moment you click the shutter button, the standpoint you choose – they are yours alone. The next guy who comes in will do something else. A lot of people have a kind of funny selfishness when it comes to knowledge on photography, settings, the type of camera. I think we should share all of this freely, to everyone, because no one can steal your picture, it's impossible. Your entire context, everything you've read, all the things you like, the movies you've seen, the mood you're in today – all these things are present, like in a concentrated solution, which makes you click the shutter button at a certain moment.

Why do you emphasize aesthetics? Why is beauty important in war photography?

I don't believe in a brutal kind of forensic photography with gruesome details. I want to cause a reaction that somehow helps, and I think aesthetics is a very good vehicle. What you see is still horrible, but it comes in a more delicate presentation, which more people will resonate with, because of its so-called beauty, in very large quotation marks. We cannot, of course, talk about beauty when it comes to an image of dead bodies, such as the one in the Pulitzer editorial, which is probably my least favorite image of what I did in Ukraine, precisely because it is very brutal and explicit. But there are situations where there is no other way.

Ethical dilemmas. Have you ever turned something down? Can you say no?

I have a very hard time saying no to anything, because I feel obligated to do everything I can, from the little things to the big things, for anyone. I feel it's my duty to fix the entire planet – that's another disease, known as the fairy complex. The idea that you have to show up with a magic wand that can solve everything. And it can't. I suppose this thing also comes from education, or from what you see around you. If I went to camp with 40 kids and one of them was unhappy, I felt like it would be my responsibility to make everyone feel good.

Technically, the theory goes like this: where there is risk of death or injury, you can say no, you don't have to go to war. At war you are exposed, no matter how well you protect yourself, no matter how experienced, or how rational you are.

When you start out photographing conflict as a young child, so to speak, you get this label, so you will be sought out for that. When my mother was sick and her treatment lasted for a year, I couldn't leave for months, and I didn't suffer any consequences. When my mother was going through a period of physical and emotional fragility, I couldn't put her in a position where she’d turn on the television and find out that something had happened, or have to watch out that something might have happened to me and wait for me to call. So you can say no.

You have won many awards for your work. How do you see them, what role do awards play in this job?

There is this one award that I like very much, Bayeux, which is only for war correspondents. I won one in 2023, but I was clever enough to hide it. I'm happy that I'm getting awards, but it also weighs me down. I would also like attention, but I can't handle it either. It always seems a bit unfair to me, we need to bear in mind that awards are subjective, like everything else in this world.

I think that the images from Mariupol weighed a lot at the Pulitzer, there was one team that remained stranded there, they did two or three exclusives, there are some heavy images from there, which I think weighed about as much as everything else the rest of us did. I told the photographer with the images from Mariupol, ‘You won this, we just tagged along with you.’ For this, he deserves it – it was an exclusive, in a high risk situation. There are a lot of people who are somehow right to feel wronged that they didn't get an award. The Pulitzer Prize is very loud, it's like an Oscar. Everyone's heard of it, even if they don't know exactly what it is. A lot of people watch a movie just because it was nominated for an Oscar, and so they see the movie, good or bad, however it might be. That work will be seen. There are many other more niche awards, which showcase phenomenal works that will never be seen, because the award is not well known. I think the bottom line, apart from the recognition for the people who do the work, is that it opens the eyes of a large number of people on the planet, who wouldn't necessarily have opened their eyes onto it. It increases this awareness, which is actually the only thing that gives us some kind of hope – that someday a large enough number of people on earth will understand that we don't need to end up killing each other. I could never say that there is a positive thing about war, because there isn’t. But the most beautiful thing, in my experience, is access to the very thing that maintains your hope in the human species – extraordinary moments, created by these people who are universally called by the horrible term of ‘ordinary people,’ or ‘simple people,’ who do absolutely incredible things, moments of humanity in the absolute sense of the word. In addition to the oppression and hopelessness that war induces, you also see things that make you think – we are not a horrible species that only does harm to itself.

The photographs are copyrighted, courtesy of The Associated Press. Their use in any form outside the FRONT exhibition and the materials published in Scena9 is illegal and will be punished according to the law.

Translated from the Romanian by Ioana Pelehatăi