“.. to photograph someone is a sublimated murder.” Susan Sontag
Disfavourable View
When Russia started its occupation of Donetsk in 2014 and established its proxy government there, one of the first things this new power did was seize the major Donetsk art center called Izolyatsia. A group of armed men simply entered the territory of the institution, showing a piece of paper stating that the place now belonged to the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR).
Leonid Baranov, a head of the so-called, Special Committee of DNR, which started quartering in Izolyatsia, commented on the seizure in his video interview to the Russian Forbes: “This is the same plant about which they say that it was almost the center of the world art, which we allegedly occupied. Considering what kind of art it was, it was impossible not to occupy it”[1], he said.
To prove the rightfulness of their invasion, Baranov chose to focus on Boris Mikhailov’s book, found by him in Izolyatsia’s library. Flipping the pages of the book in front of the camera, he said: “Those people hate everything Slavic, everything Russian. Therefore, we could not watch all this and stand aside.” The choice of Mikhailov’s book to support this claim was apt: the artist’s take on the post-Soviet society is not complimentary at all. “This has nothing to do with anything lofty or sublime”[2], complained Baranov about Mikhailov’s art, and he was totally right. Indeed, Mykhailov is interested not in “the sublime and lofty,” but in unmasking the dark side of it.
Taking the Izolyatsia premises under control, the new administration, first of all, destroyed all the artworks, which, epitomized, as Baranov assumed, the hostile outlook on everything Slavic and russian. “It’s an art of the European integrated Maidan people? Let them practice this art on their Maidan, until we get there”[3], commented on the artworks at Izolyatisa, another representative of DNR militia, nicknamed Mongol.
Cleared of the artworks, Izolyatsia was turned into a torture prison. According to the numerous testimonies of the Izolyatsia former prisoners, the detention there doesn’t imply any lawful procedure, and its operation is not regulated by any legal documents. You can be placed there without any legal conviction and even explanation, and are not granted any rights, such as the right to call your relatives or the right to call for an advocate. Describing the operation of the Izolyatsia concentration camp, its former prisoner Stanislav Aseyev points out the outstanding randomness of its captives, which created an impression that literally anyone, regardless of his or her activity or political views, could end up there by some bad luck. He claimed that many of those newly arrived were genuinely confused about why they’d been detained and believed it was some kind of mistake.
Most of the prisoners, regardless of their background, are incriminated for espionage[4]. This sentence can be attributed without any legal procedure to anyone who enters the DNR territory without special permission from its authorities, who has pro-Ukrainian views, or who, for some reason, happened to be non grata for local authorities. In other words, the very act of seeing is criminalized if the authorities suspect disfavor in the view.
Stanislav Aseyev described his experience of detention in Izolyatisa in his truly remarkable book, The Torture Camp On Paradise Street. He wrote that the main rule of the prison is a strict prohibition to observe: “In Izolyatsia, we were ordered not to look at the windows (never mind that they were painted over), or at the CCTV camera, or at the tray slot— the small opening in the door through which the guards delivered food. Because each of these objects was located on a different wall, we were compelled to stare straight ahead in space or at the floor, silently and without moving”[5]. Despite the fact that the administration staff of Izolyarisa wears balaclavas covering their faces, during the encounters with them, the prisoners always have to have plastic bags on their heads. Those bags are handed to them immediately upon arrival and should be carefully preserved. “As soon as a door opens, everyone in the cell jumps to their feet, pulls the bags over their heads, places their hands behind their backs, and turns to face the window”[6], writes Aseyev. The self-proclaimed authorities reserve the right to look for themselves, while those who are conquered should remain in the position of the object, exposed and accessible for the gaze, but never returning it.
It’s tempting to interpret the elaborate elusion of being seen, established by the prison administration, as an expression of inability to endure the gaze of the other, already manifested by them in the destruction of the artworks. Yet, first of all, it is, of course, a clear sign of their criminal activity. This uneven distribution of the right to look, which is designed to set up and secure the power of the Izolyatisa authorities, at the same time, exposed its illegitimacy and infirmity.
Visual Regime of Occupation
The same visual dispositive is established on all Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine. My friend who visited Kherson after de-occupation wrote on her Instagram: “In the eyes of everyone I met was something that is quite hard to describe. The traces of fear these people lived with for many months… People were talking about hiding their phones in their underwear while going out. About avoiding looking at the Russians – you could be taken only for that.”[7] The heavy regulations of sight established by the Russian invaders are rooted, obviously, in the fear of insurgency and reprisal.
According to visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, the prohibition to look is inherent to the visual regime of slavery. Visual organization of the Atlantic plantation machine, Mirzoeff writes, implied that “overseers punished ‘eye service’ by the enslaved, meaning unauthorized eye contact indicating insubordination.”[8]
The visual regime of slavery, described by Mirzoeff, discloses the mechanism of imposition of colonial power. “Authority’s presumed origin in legality is, in fact, one of force, the enforcement of law, epitomized in this context by the commodification of the person as a forced labor that is slavery”[9], writes Mirzoeff. The law of the colonial rule can only be violently enforced and therefore, can never be legitimate. Aimed at protecting self-proclaimed authorities from retribution, the violence in response to the gaze of the oppressed is a form of recognition of the illegitimacy of colonial rule. The gaze of the oppressed is a threat because it is a hostile gaze; everything it sees can be used against the oppressor.
The most extreme form of such regulation was imposed in Bucha: “They told us that, where we’re going, there’s a lot of civilians walking around. And they gave us the order to kill everyone we see”, Russian soldier named Sergey told his gilfrend in the phone call intercepted by the Ukrainan security. “Why the fuck?”, asked his girlfriend. “ Because they might give away our positions”[10]. The very capacity to look is already threatening to the invaders to such an extent that the one who possesses it should be eliminated immediately.
This prohibition to look is coupled with the all-encompassing surveillance. “In the mythology of slavery, the overseer magically knew and saw everything that transpired on the plantation”[11], writes Mirzoeff. “Whether it was true or not, this perception of being constantly watched was what the overseer intended”[12].
Describing the surveillance regime of Izolyatisa, Aseyev wrote: “Sometimes we felt like we were in the middle of an experiment; the utter unreality of what was happening and being filmed with a dozen cameras would make us believe that”[13]. Describing the most terrifying tortures, he emphasizes: “And all of it is documented, all of it captured— there’s a camera in each cell, in each solitary, in every basement”[14].
“To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, …it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed”[15], wrote Susan Sontag. The prisoners, deprived of the right to look, were turned into a spectacle, or, as Sontag would say, into objects that can be possessed. Even if the one got released from imprisonment or was simply killed there, his or her image remains the property of the perpetrators. “It didn’t matter who or what you were before coming here”[16], wrote Aseyev. In the weird movie filmed by the prison’s cameras, you are captured in the role of a prisoner, a defeated enemy, or a convicted criminal. By transforming individuals into characters of a torture horror documentary, the self-proclaimed authorities classify reality in their own manner and visualize the order enforced by them.
Image Extraction
While the modes of utilization of the extensive video archives of violence produced at the Izolyatisa torture camp are still to be explored, at least part of the footage produced there is known to be used by the Russian state-controlled media channels. According to the testimonies of the former prisoners, after hours of torture, they were offered to read or retell in their own words the text provided to them by the executors in front of the camera. Those videos are being circulated on the official Russian TV channels, but also via different Russian state-controlled Telegram channels.
Sometimes, more deliberate production is involved. For example, Stanislav Aseyev was coercively featured in the episode of the Sladkov + program on the Russia 24 channel. The episode included an interview with Aseyev where he said what he was asked to say, and some staged footage of his prison life. While the interview was recorded by Sladkov + production team, the prison footage, aimed at demonstrating the “decent conditions” of detention, was recorded by the local operatives of the DNR’s Ministry of State Security. “Operatives from the so-called counterintelligence arrived, took me to the neighboring cell – it was a women’s cell, form where the women were taken out, and forced to eat buckwheat porridge, which was cooked especially for me, to leaf through a book on video, and when I asked the question – why, they said – it’s none of your business”, recalls Aseyev.
Stanislav Aseyev at the Sladkov+ on the Russia 24 channel
The operatives’ job was also to coerce Aseyev to give the interview to Sladkov, which they did by threatening him to detain and torture his mother if he refused to collaborate. They also briefed him on what he should and shouldn’t say during the interview. The main rule was to confirm to his “espionage “ criminal case , made up by the DNR security service, which Aseyev was forced to sign after days of severe torture. The operatives didn’t explain to Aseyev what program he was being filmed for, but told him that they worked for some “big cheese.” The big cheese was Alexandr Sladkov, a special correspondent of the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company and Senior Lieutenant of the Russian Armed Forces. The executors who tortured Aseyev to make him sign the case, as well as operatives who coerced him to give the interview and filmed part of the footage, functioned, therefore, as a part of his media production team.
Stanislav Aseyev and Alexandr Sladkov at the Sladkov+ on the Russia 24 channel
The Izolyatsia prison is not a unique place of Russian image productions of this kind. Filtration camps, detention centers in the temporarily occupied territories, and regular Russian prisons where Ukrainian hostages are jailed function as an extension of the Russian media complex.
“Torture rooms operate simultaneously as machines for extracting information from people, and as the mises-en-scène for Russian propaganda TV, which broadcasts information placed forcibly into the mouths and bodies of disposable war subjects. These subjects are compelled to articulate messages or confessions by means of electric current, water torture, rape, hunger, broken bones, and cut flesh[17]”, wrote media scholar Svitlana Matvienko.
Among such footage, there is also a forced address of the famous Ukrainian journalist, Viktoria Roshchyna, where she says that the Russian armed forces saved her life and health.
It was recorded by Russian prison guards after Viktoria was captured and forcefully detained in Berdiansk in exchange for her release. After her release, she wrote a report about her detention, where she described how she was locked and interrogated by the members of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), beaten, and threatened to be killed or sent to prison if she refused to collaborate. “We have no morals, we don’t know any law”, “If you are buried somewhere here, no one will ever know and no one will ever find you,”[18] she quoted her interrogators’ words in her report. She refused to work for FSB and announced a hunger strike. After a week of a strike, when she could barely move, FSB people proposed that she read the text written by them on camera to get released, and she accepted the offer. This coercively recorded video was widely circulated across Russian social media as evidence of Russia’s humane treatment of war prisoners.
Viktoria Roshchyna’s forced adress
A bit more than a year after her release, Roschyna traveled again to the occupied territories to report on the detention and torture facilities in the city of Enerhodar. She was captured again. In May 2024, after nearly nine months without any news about her, Russian authorities confirmed that Roshchyna had been detained on the territory of the Russian Federation. Her dead body was returned by Russia to Ukraine in February 2025 with numerous signs of torture.
Coercion-Media Complex
Colonial rule is described by Mirzoeff as a metamorphosis machine[19]. The metamorphosis is enacted by the gaze of the colonizer, who “does not see everything there is to see”[20], but instead projects his own colonial reality onto the visible, while “any failure to conform to this reality is corrected with violence”[21], he writes This gaze, backed up with the infrastructure of violence, transforms humans into things: tools or instruments of production.
The Russian occupational coercion-media complex is a material manifestation of such a metamorphosis machine. Although Russian propaganda is usually described in terms of disinformation, or manipulated content aimed at deceiving the audience, here we face a new modality of image production, which exceeds the logic of the fake. It is no longer the case of a manipulated representation. What is altered and manipulated is not the image, but the very source of it, – the living human being. The representation produced by the coercive media machine doesn’t mirror, mimic, or imitate reality. On the contrary, reality is being forced to mimic the representation. The body is being forced to provide a material referent to a hollow signifier of propaganda.
Russian media, in this case, functions not as a tool of representing or misrepresenting reality, but as a coercive machine aimed at subjugating reality to representation. The infrastructure of the detention facilities, the labor of executors who torture the detainees, and the entire coercion apparatus that endowed the torturers with power function as constitutive parts of the Russian media apparatus.
This violence-backed spectacle is not even aimed at being plausible. It is not to persuade or incline, it is to manifest the power over the visible, the power to secure a certain vision of reality. The media image produced with the means of violence claims truth not through trust or plausibility but through force. These kinds of images represent nothing else but the power to define the visible, where the visible is what is inscribed on matter by force. “The truth” is what was rendered visible through violence.
Just a Body
“As an instrument of labor, the slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a value. His or her labor is needed and used. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity”[22], wrote Achille Mbembe in his seminal essay on “Necropolitics”. While Mbembe is focused more on the slave’s status as a source of financial value, he briefly, and quite enigmatically, mentions the strange capacity of the slave’s body to be an inexhaustible tool of representation. “Treated as if he or she no longer existed except as a mere tool and instrument of production, the slave nevertheless is able to draw almost any object, instrument, language, or gesture into a performance and then stylize it”[23], he writes. As if by being deprived of any identity, a slave’s body turns into a perfect simulation machine; being turned into nobody, a slave could represent anybody. Within the media-driven world, this capacity turns into a major source of the value produced by the enslaved.
Within the Russian occupational apparatus, humans are being used as a source of image extraction and, at the same time, as a tool of propaganda content production. The coerced labor of the Russian concentration camps’ prisoners, as well as inhabitants of the occupied territories, is to perform in the media spectacle of the so-called Russian world. The value extracted from the captivated human beings by means of torture is an image supporting the Russian propaganda version of reality.
In the article “Producing the Subject of Deportation. Filtration Process during the Russia-Ukraine War”, Daria Hetmanova and Svitlana Matvienko describe the experience of filtration conveyed to them by their interviewee, Natalia, and, particularly, the feeling of desubjectivation. They register how in the process of the deportation from occupied Mariupol, “Natalia felt a complete loss of control over the situation, and her sense of self was lost, too. She felt carried away by the will of others, suppressing her own will. Just like a body, not her body.”[24] Seated on the floor in the military Ural trucks, among others, “Natalia stopped feeling as a person and the sense of total indifference about the entire situation filled her up. Someone said they felt like captives or slaves”[25], they report.
Natalia describes how in the filtration camp in the Bezimenne village of the Novoazovsky region, before being interrogated, each person was photographed from different angles, and, in particular, from above[26].
This picture from above, needed apparently for the drone recognition of the person, is the essence of the occupational visuality.
The predatory gaze from above, which desubjectivizes the person by turning her into a target, into a form of death-in-life (in Mbembe’s words) is a crucial condition of the occupational metamorphosis. The body turned into a target, becomes just a body, a pure surface, a malleable visual substance ready for the semantic transformation.
The body is a Ghost
“Because the slave’s life is like a ‘thing,’ possessed by another person, the slave’s existence appears as a perfect figure of a shadow”[27], writes Mbembe.
The body, coercively turned into an image, becomes a ghost of it, a leftover of the representation, attached to it as its shadow. The occupational apparatus of surveillance and violence is aimed at keeping the bodies in this shadow-state, as a silent, desolate material residue, confined to its representations possessed and controlled by the power.
And yet, the ghost’s fate is to haunt, to corrode the surface of the visible with its persistent presence, to threaten the settled meanings.
“Why did I, a journalist, annoy him in particular? To me, the answer was obvious: he could see himself reflected in my eyes”[28], wrote Aseyev about his most violent prosecutor in Izolyatsia, reflecting on the only source of power left to him in the prison, which was the power to see his perpetrators and mirror back to them who they were to him. The bodies of those ensleaved into images of russian propaganda still possess the vision. Under their gaze, the opaque disguise of the self-proclaimed masters putrifies, revealing the criminals waiting for retribution.
When the body of Viktoris Roshchyna was returned to Ukraine from a Russian prison, it was mislabeled as “unidentified male” and lacked various parts of the body, including the brain, eyeballs, and larynx – the organs which enable seeing, thinking, and speaking. Restricting her freedom and even taking her life was not enough. Her perpetrators removed her organs of comprehension and expression as if horrified by her very ability to see and to know what they are.
And yet, even deprived of life and organs, her body is an eye through which we can see them unmasked.
—
[1] “Leonid Baranov at Izolyatsia”, Izolyatsia in Exile, https://izolyatsia.org/en/project/exile
[2] Ibid
[3] “Mongol”, Izolyatsia in Exile, https://izolyatsia.org/en/project/exile
[4] Lesia Kulchynska’s interview with Stanislav Aseyev, from the author’s archive.
[5] Aseyev, Stanislav, The Torture Camp On Paradise Street, Ukrainian Research Institute Harvard University, 2023, p.36
[6] Ibid.
[7] @ooleksandra_kravchenko, Instagram, November 20, 2022, (https://www.instagram.com/p/ClMy6eNtb_w/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==)
[8] Nicholas Mirzoeff , White Sight. Visual Politics ad Practices of Whiteness, The MIT Press, 2023, p. 29
[9] Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look. A Counterhistory of Visuality. – Duke University Press, 2011, p. 7
[10] “‘Putin Is a Fool’: Intercepted Calls Reveal Russian Army in Disarray”, New York Times, Sep. 28, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/09/28/world/europe/russian-soldiers-phone-calls-ukraine.html.
[11] Nicholas Mirzoeff , White Sight. Visual Politics ad Practices of Whiteness, The MIT Press, 2023, p. 52
[12] Ibid.
[13] Aseyev, Stanislav, The Torture Camp On Paradise Street, Ukrainian Research Institute Harvard University, 2023, p.XVII
[14] Ibid.
[15] Susan Sontag, On Photography, RosettaBooks, 2005, p. 10
[16] Aseyev, Stanislav, The Torture Camp On Paradise Street, Ukrainian Research Institute Harvard University, 2023, p.29
[17] Matviyenko, Svitlana, “Speeds and Vectors of Energy Terrorism”, e-flux, #134, March 2023, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/134/525421/speeds-and-vectors-of-energy-terrorism/
[18] Вікторія Рощина, “Тиждень у полоні окупантів. Як я вибралася з рук ФСБ, «кадирівців» і дагестанців” (Viktoria Roshchyna, “A week in captivity of the occupiers. How I escaped from the hands of the FSB, “Kadyrov’s men” and Dagestanis”), Hromadske, March 26,, 2022, https://hromadske.ua/posts/tizhden-u-poloni-okupantiv-yak-ya-vibralasya-z-ruk-fsb-kadirivciv-i-dagestanciv
[19] Nicholas Mirzoeff , White Sight. Visual Politics ad Practices of Whiteness, The MIT Press, 2023, p.13
[20] Ibid. p.1
[21] Ibid
[22] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Public Culture 15(1), Duke University Press, 2023, p.21
[23] Ibid., p.22
[24] Getmanova, Matviyenko (2022): Producing the Subject of Deportation. Filtration Processes during the Russia-Ukraine War . Sociologica, 16(2), p. 244, https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/15387
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid.p. 245
[27] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, Public Culture 15(1), Duke University Press, 2023, p.22
[28] Aseyev, Stanislav, The Torture Camp On Paradise Street, Ukrainian Research Institute Harvard University, 2023, p.188