The conflict in Ukraine In the last few months, he has left the world’s front pages and Zelensky decided to play his queen in an attempt to regain visibility. For it Olena Zelenskawife of the Ukrainian president, gave a report for the magazine Vogue. “Photography is always an object in context”, Susan Sontag taught us. The brand Vogue is a luxury fashion magazine, linked to the celebrities worldwide and in the style of haute couture. Headquartered in New York, it is considered the most influential fashion magazine in the world.
Part of the electoral campaign that brought Zelensky to the presidency took place when the fourth season of the series was taking place. servant of the people, which has him as the protagonist and Zelenska as a screenwriter. The combination of fiction and reality is at the genesis of what is lived today in Ukraine. But while for some all reality is reduced to a story, for others, not all history can become a soap opera that blurs the difference between reality and fiction.
the simulation
Annie Leibovitzmagazine photographer Rolling Stoneauthor of historical photos and Susan Sontag’s partner for 15 years, was chosen to do the report. In his photos, the scenarios linked to the war are real. The report takes place in the Mariisnky Palace, imperial residence until 1917, on the outskirts of kyiv, in the presidential office and at the Antonov airport. The objective, Zelenska points out in the report, is the request for weapons for the war.
In the photo chosen for the cover of the magazine we see Zelenska sitting on a step of the palace’s marble staircase, looking at camera. She is disheveled for the parameters of a fashion magazine, without makeup, without jewelry, with low shoes and clothes of sober colors, black pants, light shirt. The only touch of distinction is the fringes on her shirt. Zelenska does not have a watch or bracelets, sitting on the marble her focus shows behind her the columns of the Palace between which sandbags can be seen. Inside the magazine, a photo shows a larger shot of this same situation. There you can see the contrast of a large blue mat with the sandbags piled up. An armed soldier with his back turned poses for the photo.
In another of the photos, Zelenska appears next to the wreckage of a downed plane, standing with a group of female soldiers at Antonov airport. She wears a blue coat that stands out from the rest of the military women photographed, armed and in camouflage clothing, she with a skirt and a long blue coat takes the coat up to her chest. The colors of the clothes match the remains of the plane. The female soldiers look in different directions, as if at that moment they are taking care of their safety. The image combines glamor and pose in a war setting. The artifice is visible. The female soldiers are real, the setting is real but, stolen at that moment of the war (or as part of their tasks in the army?), the soldiers (there is no feminine for this word) pose to Vogue.
Diffusion strategy of the real
We see a drill, artificial poses with real actors, indistinction between the real and the fictional. The simulation is not hidden, the settings, the sets, the poses, the costumes, the main and secondary characters were chosen. everything is visible. There is no false representation, the female soldiers act as female soldiers, the simulation is transformed into the real photographed and even the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine shared on its social networks one of the photos of the report. In this case, simulation is a strategy for disseminating reality.
In the other two photos of the report the presidential couple stars. In one of them both look at the camera, Zelensky dressed in a simple military green shirt, she in blue, shirt and pants. They dress elegant and sober, he grabs her arm strongly and firmly, giving a feeling of protection and care.. There is no luxury in the image, only her rings are visible, the colors of her clothes match the stripped and gray environment. In the other photo, both are also looking at the camera, this time they are holding hands. In the epigraph they tell us that the photo was taken in an office of the presidential complex in kyiv. Zelensky’s shirt and pants match the green leather couch, Zelenska is in the same fringed ivory shirt she posed in sitting on the marble staircase. On an armchair behind them can be seen a freshly framed portrait of Zelensky still wrapped. They do not smile, their gestures rather express concern and melancholy. Every detail in the four images is taken care of, calculated.
The photos managed to get people talking about Ukraine again, but not about the war. They searched through a strategy of romanticization of conflict keep the spotlight on there. But mediatization at any cost has its risks. Not because you can’t talk about war in fashion magazines, in fact there were other experiences where fashion and war intersected that resulted in powerful and disruptive images. For example, the one that starred Lee Miller, model and photographer, who photographed the first liberated Nazi death camps. Miller and David Scherman managed to get into Hitler’s apartment in Munich, after having photographed the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp. Sherman, reporter for Lifeportrayed her naked in Hitler’s bathtub. There is in that image a message of appropriation, irony, revenge. A symbol of victory. In the famous photo, Lee Miller is in the bathtub, with a portrait of Hitler in the background, and Miller’s mud-stained boots propped up on the bath mat. The photo is not a simple provocation but a defiant and demanding message.
In the report to the Zelensky couple, the war seems instead to be captured by the rules of fashion and entertainment. There are calculated poses and melodrama. For a few days the front pages of world journalism returned to talk about Ukraine but not about the war or the refugees, or the loss of life, or the geopolitical interests involved. But the timeliness or not of this report.
The medium is the message
It would seem that the “society of the spectacle” invaded everything. Also the representation of war. The fashion magazine as a channel of enunciation in this case neutralizes and wraps the images in a register of superficiality and mercantile circulation. The commitment to visibility is reduced to the banality of images.
The photos were also published on the social networks of Annie Leibovitz, They went viral and added thousands of repudiation reactions: Hollywoodization of tragedy, trivialization of war as a consumer product, counterproductive mix of records, superimposition of glamor and suffering, aestheticization of violence in a scene of devastation, lack of empathy in an alliance of fashion and politics, communication without ethics and frivolity that disrespects the victims of the conflict are some of the arguments that could be read in opinion pieces and social networks.
The few voices that did not question the report pointed out that behind these photos there is a well-thought-out communication strategy that helps keep Ukraine on the media agenda and that, in times of female empowerment, Olena Zelenska’s attitude serves to remind the role of women in the conflict.
What will the millions of Ukrainian refugees who were forced to flee their homes under Russian bombardment think of the report? The hard data of the war indicates that about 9 million Ukrainians had to move from their homes and seek refuge abroad, the majority are women and children. Men between the ages of 18 and 60 are forced to stay in the country and are called upon to enlist in the armed forces. It is estimated that 5,000 Ukrainian civilians have died and there are no accurate data on the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed, but some media speak of 200 per day since the conflict began. On the Russian side, Pentagon Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl said from Washington that the army has suffered between 70,000 and 80,000 casualties since it began its military operation at the end of February. It is still impossible to know the truth of these numbers.
Susan Sontag, in her book Regarding the pain of others, discusses the problem of the exhibition of horror and points out that on the one hand there is the hardening of a type of spectator, who ask for more and more pain, greater crudeness, greater accumulation of anonymous suffering; and on the other, there is the excess of horror, the moments in which the terrible is exposed. The ruins left by a war have always been the object of aesthetic contemplation. But in this report none of this happens. The “war and fashion” photography focuses on the story of the presidential couple in a besieged Palace.
Without falling into moral or self-righteous arguments, these photos posed in war scenes do not seem to generate emotion, solidarity, or knowledge about the suffering caused by war. Nor help the Ukrainian presidential couple to get more weapons.
They would rather seem to be photos where what Sontag pointed out is verified: “its main effect is to turn the world into a supermarket (…) where any model is reduced to a consumer item, promoted to an object of aesthetic appreciation”.
Some time ago Marshall McLuhan taught us that ‘the medium is the message’. Vogue He is the one who produced, took and circulated the photographs. Photos in a war zone that became fashion photos in a fashion magazine. Is there something today in the social conflicts and human dramas around the world that can be left out of the capture of an aesthetic and mercantile register? Will the photos in this report fall into the category of war photography?
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine continues.
For now he is winning Vogue.
* Doctor in Social Sciences, associate researcher at Conicet, coordinator of the Photography Studies Area of the Faculty of Social Sciences, UBA.