New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
On the front lines in Ukraine
CT photographer’s images ‘bring the story home’ for U.S. viewers
STAMFORD — As a news-wire photographer for the past 30 or so years, John Moore has covered conflicts across the world.
Moore, a Stamford resident since 2015, has photographed scenes from Nicaragua, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir and the Balkans.
Despite his experience in war zones, Moore said he wouldn’t describe himself as a war photographer.
“Over the years, I’ve tried to be involved in the news that matters, and it just so happens that sometimes that’s conflicts and wars,” Moore said in an interview days after returning from Ukraine, where he recently spent more than six weeks. He previously took photos in the country in 2014.
The Getty Images senior staff photographer and special correspondent said he tries to capture “not only the ugly things” but “the beautiful moments as well.”
He has also covered public health crises internationally and domestically, including the Ebola outbreak in West Africa and the COVID-19 pandemic here in the United States.
For 10 years, much of his work was centered on immigration.
His book, “Undocumented: Immigration and the Militarization of the United States-Mexico Border,” was published in 2018.
His photo from the same year of a two-year-old Honduran girl crying beside her mother, who was being searched at the border, went viral and won the 2019 World Press Photo of the Year.
Moore, who is from Texas, has worked for Getty since 2005. Before that, he was a photographer for the Associated Press. He was part of a team of AP photographers that won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for their photos of the Iraq War.
During his recent trip to Ukraine, what stood out was “the incredible resilience of the people there” and how welcoming they were, he said.
In other conflicts, “sometimes the people who were friendly and people who were unfriendly were mixed together, and it was often difficult to know where the danger lay,” Moore said. “In Ukraine, it was clear that the people of Ukraine wanted and continue to want international journalists to show this happening. They’re very generous, even in the most difficult of moments.”
At funerals for civilians who had been killed, for instance, mourners were “very open to showing their loss and the injustice involved,” he said.
Bringing the story home
He said he went to three areas of Ukraine, spending two weeks in each. First, he photographed the damage to the suburbs around Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, then traveled south toward Kherson and spent time near the front lines. The last leg of his trip was in the area around Kharkiv, not far from the RussiaUkraine border.
In the suburbs near Kiev, he found people coming back to homes that had been hit by shelling. He recalled a woman named Oksana looking through her heavily damaged house.
“On the surface, (it) looked like the destruction … from a tornado that we would see here in the U.S.,” Moore said. “But you don’t have to look far before you see the shrapnel all around and how everything is destroyed with pieces of metal from explosions, including her book collection, which was completely shot through with shrapnel.”
He sometimes used a drone to capture moments from a different perspective. One such photo shows members of a congregation celebrating Orthodox Easter outside their church that had been bombed.
“They were all gathered in a circle as a priest blessed them one by one with holy water, and photographing that from above and just seeing the scene was touching for me,” Moore said.
In the city of Kiev, he attended a press conference held by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a subway stop underground.
Later, he took photos of a married couple in their 80s, Olexiy and Maria Pshenychnykh, in a village near Kharkiv. The couple stayed in their home despite Russian forces occupying the village for some time.
Moore said for many seniors in Ukraine, “moving to another country is just too scary.”
In a shot he took of Olexiy, the 85-year-old man is lying down on a bed with his left hand covering his face. The ceiling above him is in tatters.
“Images like that I think made this war more personal in a way to the viewers,” Moore said. “Yes, I photographed on the front lines and I photographed Ukrainian soldiers in battle. But, really, what brings the story home I think is how this affects civilians and people that we can identify with.”
Moore said he always had a translator with him when he was working. For much of his trip, a local documentary filmmaker translated for him.
While near the front lines, he wore a bulletproof vest and helmet.
“Every day was different,” he said. “Sometimes we had plans to go to specific areas, and sometimes we would go out to areas of the countryside we hadn’t been to yet and really see what we could find.”
When he approached people, he would tell them his name and who he worked for and then say: “If it’s OK, I’d like to show a little bit of your reality if you’ll have me here for a while.”