Discussing Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, the editor of the Ukrainian translation, Olena Chervonyk, draws attention to an image absent from the book — the very image that transformed Barthes’s thinking about photography and its weight: the photograph of his mother in the Winter Garden. Chervonyk raises the debate that surrounds teh image: did it truly exist, was it real? I, in turn, think of the “absent image” as something that alters the narrative of a story. It is difficult to name the exact number of images produced in wartime — in the Russian war against Ukraine, for instance. One can count those belonging to various news agencies or attempt to look at social media statistics for images tagged with geolocation and relevant keywords. But arriving at a precise figure is impossible — the number grows daily, if not by the minute. What concerns me, however, is something else: within this endless stream of images produced by professionals and amateurs, is there something that escapes our field of vision?
Barthes’s photograph of his mother existed — at least within his account. But what matters here is something different: we as readers cannot assess it, not even with ordinary curious eyes. In that case, what might such an “absent image” look like in the context of images produced during a prolonged war, and how might it shape our understanding of that war’s trajectory, its excess, and its injustice? Does the absent image equal the invisible in war — and which images, despite their presence in media and archives, remain unseen?
I began thinking of the “absent image” as a kind of visual utopia, one that possesses agency and transformative force — the power, for instance, to influence how the story of a war is told. But I paused to ground my thoughts in what I genuinely do not see, and why. My thinking began to coalesce around closed territories: captivity, active combat zones, life under occupation — how much of any of this is available to the eye?
Such stories often reach us through text; the account is built from testimony. When thinking about absence, the first thought that arises concerns censorship by social media platforms or intelligence services, which suppress and remove unwanted content as “sensitive.” But what about the images that remain invisible for other reasons — images showing life in territories where power and control have become total, where an outside gaze is rendered impossible by fear for one’s own life?
“Searching for material by the names of cities and villages, and by keywords such as ‘shelling,’ ‘burial,’ and so on, we reviewed several thousand videos. After the full-scale invasion began, the content on ordinary private accounts shifted: sheltering in basements, evacuating from occupied territories, attempts to survive. On some of these channels, the last videos were uploaded in March or April of 2022, and they were never updated again. The fate of the people behind these channels is unknown” — so write the authors of Civilians. Invasion (2023), the Kharkiv artist collective of Daniil Revkovsky and Andriy Rachynsky, in their work’s description. Their piece, like much of their practice, takes the form of moving images assembled from found footage sourced on YouTube — material created by ordinary people. Despite early requests from authorities and the military not to circulate photo and video documentation, some people published their material regardless, driven by the need to bear witness to the horrors they had encountered. Most of these videos remain on YouTube, but without significant views or comments — they matter only to those who posted them.
According to Daniil Revkovsky, one of the artists, the small proportion of deleted videos suggests people removed them for reasons of personal safety. Yet as the artist explains, when searching social media and working through digital video archives, the videos that remain published are effectively buried — extraordinarily difficult to locate within the constantly produced stream of content. He is convinced that images created by people with small followings pose no significant threat in the moment and remain, in essence, invisible. Thus, their voice, their experiences, are literally drowned out by the abundance of content produced by large channels and those that influence the algorithms. And while the algorithms themselves change, what remains constant is that in the fight for attention, such small personal experiences end up on the periphery, out of sight.
The greatest risk Revkovsky identifies in this invisibility lies not in the images themselves but in what happens to them afterward: who uses them, and how they are interpreted, and even in alternative points of view — that oppose these experiences and casts a shadow over them.
Civilians. Invasion may be ethically contentious, since the images were used as found footage without the authors’ consent, even if their metadata was preserved. Work of this kind may, in different contexts, require more sustained commentary: some of the videos contain close-ups showing death; some footage was shot with a trembling hand; in some, people are crying. However, in their artwork, Revkovsky and Rachynsky retain a documentary and archival dimension, crediting each source and the date of publication. Yet only in the form of moving images do these videos achieve their purpose — speaking of people’s experiences in the first person, often disclosing their most intimate details.
Two episodes have not left my imagination. In the first, a teenage girl near a shelter interviews a taxi driver, asking why he chose his profession. The stocky man, his masculinity half-concealed behind jokes, tells her it’s a stupid question — minutes later a plane falls and everyone runs for cover. The doors close. In the second, an elderly woman drives a volunteer out of her home; he has come to ask her to evacuate, but she refuses, because she is waiting for her son, who left the house several days earlier and has not returned. The volunteer warns her of the risk to her life and urges her not to wait — her son may have been killed. This only provokes fury: scolding, the woman slams the door directly into the camera. She stayed to wait for her son. The horror hides in that unknowing, behind those closed doors: did she find him? Did she manage to survive?
For a few minutes, the fates of these people are brought close to the viewer. But the question remains open: what happened to them? Are their stories present in the narrative of the war? And if they are no longer telling their own story, who is telling it for them?
This question — what became of these people — opens a space for interpretation that, in a protracted war, becomes a space in which narrative is set against narrative, and the personal becomes political. Literally, here, the “absent” is what remains behind closed doors.
The closed door is a symbolic gesture of protection — of being invisible to the enemy, to the one who kills. In this sense, the absent image creates its own form of safety. But at the same moment, it is the moment at which political visibility is refused, and what remains is only the question of what lies on the other side. This is not an individual predicament but a structural one, and it poses, acutely, the problem of the gaze: who is permitted to see, and at what cost to those being seen. On this threshold, we witness the moment when a story does not end — it goes into hiding. These lives exist, but we are not granted sight of them. Like the Winter Garden photograph, which exists — but in the private room of Barthes’s grief. It is here that Barthes becomes relevant again: not as a theorist of photography, but as someone who also stood before a closed image and had to decide what to do with what he could not or refuse to see.
In his text, Barthes offers an answer to this riddle: he cannot show the Winter Garden photograph to others because it exists only for him. For anyone else, it would be nothing more than one image among many. In the book, he accounts for the power of the image through two concepts — studium and punctum. The first allows us to find cultural context and situate an image within an existing body of knowledge, to understand it by following the existing logic of culture. The second gives rise to a deeply personal experience, bringing one’s own life into contact with what is seen.
Thinking about the Winter Garden photograph — which Barthes contemplates after his mother’s death, in the depths of grief, feeling the full weight of that loss — I consider this effect: how the experience of witnessing loss can make the reality of death viscerally present, deepening solitude and emptiness. According to Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa, grief is generally cited as the sole and logical reason why Barthes withholds the photograph from the reader — yet in his essay Sans Parole: Reflections on Camera Lucida, the scholar argues that behind this explanation lies a deeper, contradictory politics of visibility: what Barthes calls the deeply personal punctum is in fact constructed upon racialized, gendered, and class-bound normativity — a privileged gaze that appropriates the image and determines whose grief is visible and whose is not. I would also venture to add that in that image, Barthes saw not a young mother but his own helplessness before circumstance, his own profound grief, and his own finitude. He saw the political in the personal.
The “absent image,” then, is a deeply personal image — one that exists only for each of us individually, yet through an encounter with it we are brought close not to a photograph or a likeness, but to a human life: the life of whoever is documented there. Such images may contain no evidence of combat, no traces of destruction; they may, on the contrary, show something domestic and everyday. But it is precisely the fact that this domesticity and ordinariness has been radically altered that makes such an image significant to the viewer — regardless of whether it was made with a professional camera or belongs to the category of so-called poor images. This is why the story behind the image, in the contemporary world, carries no less weight than the image itself. The narrative that forms around it can draw this tragedy closer or push it further away, shaping where the image is ultimately placed.
Today, the Winter Garden photograph no longer belongs exclusively to Barthes — it could, theoretically, pass into what we call the public domain, and the power of the “personal,” the “withheld,” might become inaccessible without commentary. By analogy, I look at the wars of the past — wars that happened too long ago to be lost in that past without losing their direct emotional resonance. I observe those past wars through archival footage preserved in research institutions and museums. These frozen testimonies of life and horror exist in the past. Yet I think about how they shaped the course of history: images made it possible to speak of the horrors of war, to seek justice for those who suffered — at minimum, by naming perpetrators and victims. Not all photographs carry the names of those who made them.
The question of the absent image in the archive is, of course, not a new one. Working through different sources, one can begin to infer which images may be missing and what may be absent from particular archives. If existing photographs of past atrocities could not prevent wars in the present, will images made now protect future generations? And when speaking of war and violence, can the conversation concern only images of horror — what if the horror is not physiological, what if it hides somewhere else, like, for example, when we see horror not only through documentation of torture of a prisoner, but in a the prisoner’s wretched, mutilated body and tears that flow at the sight of an apple in a very first day after captivity.
I cannot rid myself of the question of what makes a wartime image public. Or more precisely: what in such an image constitutes a common inheritance, beyond questions of copyright? What does the category of “public domain” mean for those who work with this kind of historical material, beyond an attempt to come to terms with history — and what does it share with epistemological and ontological stakes?
Copyright, after all, is a legal category — a framework designed to protect authorship, to assign ownership, to draw a boundary around the individual act of creation. But wartime images trouble this framework from the outset. Many of them were made not by professionals who understood themselves to be producing cultural artifacts, but by people reaching for their phones in a basement, in a corridor, at a checkpoint — people for whom the act of recording was not aesthetic but existential. Legally, an image enters the public domain when a certain number of years have passed — when, in other words, enough time has elapsed for the culture to claim it. But this temporal logic is deeply strange when applied to atrocity. It implies that suffering has an expiration date, after which it becomes available for general use. It implies that the passage of time is neutral, that it gradually dissolves the ethical charge of an image until what remains is simply material — archivable, reproducible, citable without remainder.
Anyone who has sat with photographs from the past tragedies — First World War, or from the Holodomor, or from the liberation of the Nazi camps, — knows that ethical charge does not dissolve. So, what does it mean, then, to work with this material responsibly — not only legally, but epistemologically? Is the responsibility for recurring violence also a form of common inheritance? At present this may sound as though researchers and historians are fighting the shadow of history — and the shadow wins. Thus, the shadow wins — only when we stop asking what is behind the door. To account for what we were not permitted to see, and to understand why. The shadow is nothing other than a space of interpretation and narrative that leads us into the unknown: there, in the unknown, we examine images of people whose quality fades with time, and we try to approach them as far as our courage and our care will allow.