Stephen Shore. Shnuriv Lys, Kyivska Province, Ukraine. October 16, 2013. Chromogenic print, printed 2017, 16 × 20" (40.6 × 50.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist in honor of Quentin Bajac. © 2023 Stephen Shore

In July 2012 and October 2013, the photographer Stephen Shore traveled to Ukraine to photograph Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. For Shore, the project was somewhat unexpected. He is best known for photographs that explore the mundane aspects of American popular culture, and the Ukraine project—anchored by portraits—was both more overtly political, and more focused on people, than much of his previous work. The resulting photographs, gathered in the book Survivors in Ukraine, captured the resilience of both his subjects and their country. A decade later, with the country now at war, Shore spoke to me about the project, reflecting on his time in Ukraine.

This interview follows on more than a year of features about the impact of the war on artists, writers, and cultural groups, including Anna Sarvira’s illustrated story about daily life on the brink of the invasion, an interview with activists navigating the challenges facing LGBTQ+ refugees, a poem by Serhiy Zhadan that occupied a wall in a MoMA gallery titled In Solidarity, a short film about a pivotal painting by Ukrainian-born artist Janet Sobel, and a music commission by the Kyiv-based electronic musician and composer Oleh Shpudeiko, better known as Heinali.
—Alex Halberstadt, Senior Writer, Creative Team

The idea for this project came from my wife, Ginger. We had been supporting a foundation called the Survivor Mitzvah Project, which gives financial assistance to Holocaust survivors living in Eastern Europe. It was Ginger’s idea to go there and take pictures. So, I contacted the people at the Project and they helped arrange the visits. They work in a number of countries, and I picked Ukraine because my father’s family came from there. Not in Holocaust times, but in the 19th century.

Ukraine had a particularly dark history during the Holocaust. There were very few concentration camps there. Instead, the Nazis were coming into cities, rounding up the Jews, bringing them to ravines, and shooting them. Babyn Yar is the most famous of these sites, but there were others, such as Sukhoi Yar, as well.

Many Jews in Central and Western Europe who had survived the concentration camps received reparations from the German government. But because the survivors in Ukraine didn’t go to camps, they were not eligible for reparations and got very small subsidies from their governments. And so the Survivor Mitzvah Project was stepping in to help, providing food, housing, and clothes to the survivors.

Stephen Shore. Elka Seltzer’s Front Door, Ovruch, Zhytomyr Province, Ukraine, July 31, 2012. 2012

Stephen Shore. Elka Seltzer’s Front Door, Ovruch, Zhytomyr Province, Ukraine, July 31, 2012. 2012

Stephen Shore. Isaak Bakmayev’s Medals, Berdichev, Zhytomyrska Province, Ukraine, July 29, 2012. 2012

Stephen Shore. Isaak Bakmayev’s Medals, Berdichev, Zhytomyrska Province, Ukraine, July 29, 2012. 2012

I wanted to document these people, who were in their mid-80s to mid-90s. If I were to go today, I would find very few of them left. I also wanted to call attention to the work that was being done by the Survivor Mitzvah Project. My understanding with the Project was that I would be bringing at least a half year’s subsidy to each of the people I photographed.

Each trip was just a few weeks long. I work very quickly. When I’m in my working head, I work all day and get a lot done. And I had two people with me—a translator who also knew the survivors personally, and a driver—so I could just concentrate on work.

In Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, Scatman Crothers’s character says, talking about the Overlook Hotel, that when someone burns toast it leaves a trace. He’s talking about events from the past that have lingered. And that was my experience in Ukraine. Every day, there was this emotional sense of tragedy in the air.

Before going to Ukraine, I read the book Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder, which is both a brilliant and horrendous account of the massacres that happened in Eastern Europe under Hitler and Stalin. Maybe because of this I was primed to have a certain experience of tragedy. Or maybe it was also because I was meeting people who were nearly a century old. Or maybe it was just really there. In any case, it was almost a year before I went back again, and I wondered if I would have the same experience. And within a day, I did.

During these visits, I met around 35 survivors. We didn’t speak the same language. But all of them knew that this visit was coming. They felt gratified and honored that someone would come to visit them. Almost all had food prepared for us to share with them. Some had baked cakes. And aside from two, all of them were totally mentally sharp.

Being with them was powerful. All of the survivors went through hardships that are difficult to conceive and came through them. Of course there were many who didn’t come through, and I imagine that those who did got a kind of strength from it.

I hadn’t traveled to Eastern Europe before. The furthest east I had been was Germany and Austria. I’ve never seen richer farmland than in Ukraine. And then a lot of the history made sense. There were miles and miles of black earth, of this extraordinarily rich soil. Stalin wanted that land to feed Russia and let the Ukrainians starve, so that next year’s seed would feed the Russians. Hitler wanted this land, too, for Lebensraum. And to see miles of sunflowers in bloom was also extraordinary.

I made portraits of everyone I met but also wanted to photograph what their lives were like, the food they ate, how their homes were decorated, what they surrounded themselves with.

Stephen Shore. Bazaliya, Khmelnytska Province, Ukraine. July 27, 2012

Stephen Shore. Bazaliya, Khmelnytska Province, Ukraine. July 27, 2012

Stephen Shore. Isaak Bakmayev, Berdichev, Zhytomyrska Province, Ukraine. July 29, 2012

Stephen Shore. Isaak Bakmayev, Berdichev, Zhytomyrska Province, Ukraine. July 29, 2012

I was using a digital camera that gave me a kind of picture that couldn’t have been made 10 years earlier. It had the mobility and speed of a 35mm camera, but image quality equal at least to that of a view camera using four-by-five-inch negatives.

While I worked, the interpreter had conversations with the survivors and asked about their stories. We recorded and translated some of these conversations. The text in the book that resulted from this body of work was written by Jane Kramer, a staff writer at the New Yorker, who had access to these transcripts.

I had never done work with such clear historical and political overtones. I’d also not done anything as emotionally charged. And that was something of interest to me. I react negatively to photographs that I find emotionally manipulative. And few events spark a more immediate reaction than the Holocaust. So in a certain way for me the project was: How do I take pictures that communicate this history and its resonance without the emotional manipulation? I just trusted my instinct that somehow I could take pictures that communicated some of what I was feeling.

Let me digress a little. I once had a student at Bard College, where I teach, who was very proud of a picture she took of a friend of hers who was crying and had tears in her eyes. And she thought the picture communicated sadness, and I thought it communicated her excitement, as a photographer, at finding someone with tears in her eyes. And so, the emotion of a picture lies not necessarily in its subject, but in how it’s done. What is the creator experiencing? And do they have some degree of fluidity with the medium to be able to communicate this experience?

At that point, I’d been working consciously at photography since 1960. And I think I got to a point where I could feel something and communicate it. Where I could decide how far to be from something, what the light would look like, what I’m photographing, and somehow it got imbued with that feeling.

When I travel to countries outside of the United States and take pictures, I think about not wanting to take tourist pictures, but pictures of something that seems essential to life in a particular place. A picture that couldn’t be taken in Troy, New York, and that is unique to the place but isn’t necessarily obvious. I want to be doing in another country what I had done for years in the United States—traveling almost as a visitor and observing aspects of everyday life.

When I was traveling around the United States, my first trips were to parts of the country I had never been to before. I was seeing them fresh, but at the same time I was familiar with American culture. I was seeing things that someone who understood America would recognize but had not gotten used to yet. And so one of the things I trained myself at for years is paying attention to everyday life, and if I can do it in America and I can do it in Ukraine.

Stephen Shore. Home of Rakhil Rusakovskaya, Kiev, Kyivska Province, Ukraine, July 28, 2012. 2012

Stephen Shore. Home of Rakhil Rusakovskaya, Kiev, Kyivska Province, Ukraine, July 28, 2012. 2012

Stephen Shore. Galina Karpenko, Tomashpil, Vinnytska Province, Ukraine. July 25, 2012

Stephen Shore. Galina Karpenko, Tomashpil, Vinnytska Province, Ukraine. July 25, 2012

Like most everyone I know, I was horrified at the invasion of Ukraine [in 2021]. The impact was particularly strong since I experienced the country, having driven across almost all of the Western half of Ukraine.

I didn’t go to Eastern Ukraine, where a lot of the fighting is happening now, but I have vivid memories of the place that informs what I’m reading about today. I remember the antigovernment protests in the Maidan, right near my hotel in Kyiv. I also recall checking into a hotel in Lviv, knowing nothing about Slavic languages, but I could say “thank you” in Russian. And I said it to the porter who brought my bags up, and he just got red in the face and pointed his finger at me and said, “no.” And he said the word in Ukrainian, because he didn’t want to hear Russian. And so I would imagine the war very differently if it were just a place I knew about only from the newspaper.

Last year, a sale of prints from this project at 303 Gallery raised over $400,000 for Ukrainian relief. The gallery, my lab, and I contributed all proceeds from the sale to the United Ukrainian American Relief Committee. I also sold an NFT of the most popular image to benefit the UN relief effort. I felt particularly fortunate that my past work in Ukraine allowed me to be in a position to help.

A few years ago, the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote a review of a painting show, saying that the art was political. And he talked about political art sometimes having a “use-by date,” as he put it. He had a wonderful way with words and an imagination that would think of such perfect phrases. But there are events in the world that are almost archetypal—that are timely, historical, metaphorical, and symbolic all at the same time. And so, an event can be historical but represent something deeper at the same time. And that’s what I was looking for in this series.