Anyone Can Take Photos — and Help Preserve Heritage and Memory

“Illustrating ancient monuments, monuments of antiquity, outstanding architectural structures, picturesque areas, landscapes, cities, and so on, which are of significance to the history of Ukraine, as well as to world culture, history, and science.”

— Charter of the Odesa Photographic Society, para. 2.2

First of all, I want to thank the Chairman of the Odesa Photographic Society, the initiator of its revival, Academician O. V. Maltsev — thanks to the revived Society, I have the opportunity to publish this article.

I did not think I would write it; I am not writing it because life is easy. Cutting down trees is not such a rare event. But oaks are a special matter. In the past, people tried not to cut them down without necessity: this tree was traditionally treated with special respect, and oaks also take a very long time to grow. Unfortunately, today this tradition is being violated more and more often, although the special attitude toward the oak itself still remains. And an old oak, especially in a city, is no longer simply a tree, but a kind of living monument: wherever it grows, it is always something significant. And just recently, something happened that forced me to speak: in Teremky, Kyiv, old oaks began to be cut down — at least several of them. Without going into details, they are trying to lay a heating pipeline there along a route through an old park which, according to tradition, was once part of the ancient Holosiivskyi Forest.

And now a few words about myself and photography.

My personal passion is photographing old Oaks. I do not have an expensive camera, and to be precise, I do not have any camera at all :). However, I do not care about that. In essence, it has never stopped me from taking pictures of objects that interest me with whatever phone happened to be at hand.

Moreover, some of the photos of Kyiv oaks that I took and uploaded to Google Maps have already received tens of thousands of views and quite a few appreciative responses from people.

This, perhaps, is what I want to emphasize as the main point — this very idea is also embedded in the Charter of the Odesa Photographic Society. In my view, this does not simply show their beauty and grandeur, but also draws attention to the need for them to be protected.

There is a special procedure for granting outstanding trees protected status, and the more people know about their existence and the more attention this attracts, the easier it will be to protect them. Yes, of course, this does not provide a guarantee, but it strengthens the position — that is certain. Even if they are not yet officially protected, once people already know about them, it will be more difficult for someone to attack them.

A remark. While writing this article, I checked everything against Google Maps. Nine years ago, when I uploaded a photo of this oak there, an old sign with the nameless “Centuries-Old Oak” was hanging on it. And now! There is a new sign there, and the tree has acquired a name — “Kashchenko Centuries-Old Oak.” Over these years, the oak has received attention, and people have taken many new photographs. In my view, it did not receive its name without this attention.

For now, I will not go deeply into the history and legends of Holosiivskyi Forest and some of the ancient oak groves that are located — or, more precisely, were once located — in several districts of Kyiv and, according to beliefs and retellings, were considered sacred; I will simply note that they existed. Fortunately, some old specimens have survived.

For example, one of my favorite Oaks is Perun’s Oak, which is located in the Solomianskyi district. It is part of an ancient oak grove that stretched approximately from Shuliavka all the way to Batiieva Hora.

By the way, several other interesting specimens have survived along this stretch, for example, the so-called Partisan Oak.

The Partisan Oak is a truly unique phenomenon. A simply fantastic story happened there. It grows in the middle of the road. Can you imagine? Yes, I am not joking.

According to the stories, when they were building the residential district there, an oak stood in the place where the road was supposed to be laid, and they decided to cut it down because houses had already been built on both sides. But local residents, who loved this tree very much, came out and stood in its defense: they surrounded it, joined hands, and would not let the builders through. Their resistance was so persistent that the project had to be redesigned and special signs and a curb installed around this oak. And now there is a narrow passage there, but the oak has remained alive and continues to delight and amuse everyone who passes by and sees a huge beautiful tree growing right in the road!

Of course, I could talk about the forests and oak groves of Kyiv for a very long time, and about Holosiivskyi Forest probably endlessly) But that is not the point. Returning to the subject of photography, I want to say that if there is a desire — you can take pictures even with a brick)) And not simply take pictures, but preserve the memory of the grandeur and beauty of unique ancient trees and pass these photographs on to future generations.

This not only helps protect them and preserve memory, but future generations will also grow up with the stories that surround these ancient trees, and, in my view, this instills care, resilience, kindness, and determination in a person. That is precisely why I am sitting here at night writing this article.

These are my few words in defense of Oaks.

P.S. It turned out that this is still not the end. I managed to dig up several more photographs of young oak trees in the archives. I photographed one of them in Odesa, near the Monument to the Unknown Sailor and the Eternal Flame — I called it Baby Oak. And in Kyiv, in a park in Sviatoshyn, there is an oak planted in memory of a fallen Ukrainian soldier. This is another example of how the memory of a hero who gave his life defending Ukraine in the struggle against Russia’s military attack can be preserved.

V. H. Darahan

All photos by the author.

Photography in expeditionary work is more than a way to document what we see — it is a tool for research. This discussion explores how photography, symbolism, and field observation can be used to study cities, their history, and the cultural meanings embedded in urban space.

—
From the International Scientific and Practical Conference “City as a Classroom”
European Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
August 23–28, 2020

Photography as a Tool for the Forensic Study of Architecture

We look at old architecture as a finished object — a temple, cathedral, fortress, aqueduct, or pyramid — and asking the usual questions: who built it, when, and what style does it belong to?

But the question can be approached differently: what if what we are looking at is not simply an object, but a trace of something that once took place?

In forensic science, a trace is understood as the result of an action. A scratch, deformation, or change in material matters because it can reveal something about the process that produced it. Prof. Oleg Maltsev proposes applying the same logic to architecture: geometry, the repetition of elements, position within the landscape, later modifications, and the organization of space can all be treated as sources of information about past processes.

This is where photography becomes fundamentally important.
A camera records an object not merely as an aesthetically striking form. It preserves spatial relationships, details, and context. A photograph can be revisited later, a particular area can be enlarged, compared with other images, and examined for things that may have escaped attention during the initial inspection.

A good example is described in the materials of an expedition to Egypt. In Alexandria, a research group examined a site known as the “Roman Amphitheatre.” While working on location, a question immediately arose: was it really an amphitheatre?

During the investigation, it became clear that the site had been discovered during the construction of a government building, that the structure had initially been given a provisional name, and that the area was later supplemented with artefacts brought in from other locations. As a result, what visitors see today is no longer a simple historical object, but a multilayered space formed through several different processes.

The photography changes its function. In a photograph, we are not merely recording a “Roman amphitheatre.” We are recording the material state of a site at a particular moment — a form in which traces of different actions, interpretations, and transformations have been preserved simultaneously.

Photography therefore becomes not an illustration accompanying the research, but part of the research itself. It allows us to separate the name assigned to an object from what is actually present before our eyes, and to begin reading space as evidence.

In the article “The Archive of Arrested Processes,” Maltsev proposes approaching architecture in exactly this way: the process disappears, but its logic may continue to exist in form. The researcher therefore asks not only “What is this object?” but also “What processes left this particular trace before us?”

Read more: “The Archive of Arrested Processes: Why the Architecture of the Past May Preserve the Memory of a Different Engineering Logic”

Made in 2020 for the 129th anniversary of the Odessa Photographic Society.

The Odessa Photographic Society recreated the atmosphere in which our predecessors lived and worked — the scientist-photographers who founded the Society in the 1890s. In those days photography was something only the well-educated and well-off could take up.

As an example, here is the list of subjects taught by leading scholars at the first photographic school in Imperial Russia, founded in Odessa in 1916: scripture, Russian literature, English, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, drawing and elementary painting, technical drawing, the history of graphic arts, the study of styles and colour harmony, elementary mechanics, physics with a course in photographic optics, chemistry with a course in photochemistry, the technology of paper, wood, metal and paints, legislation, industrial hygiene, general, artistic and reproduction photography and its applications, photomechanical processes (zincography, halftone, collotype and photogravure), printing in one colour and in colour, the construction of photographic instruments, the manufacture of photographic papers and plates, and bookkeeping.

Prints of McCullin's work at the Odessa Photographic Society office.

McCullin was 83 when he said the following. Not from a chair at home.

Just because I'm 83 doesn't mean to say I have to sit here waiting to die. I'm still open to discovery. I was recently in Yemen where I spent a day with a general and his troops, photographing a lot of people whose limbs had been blown off by landmines. That evening I flew back in a Black Hawk helicopter escorted by an Apache gunship. I thought, how bloody weird – normally people like me are in a nursing home, but here I am travelling back from a war zone, in a helicopter flying 100 feet off the desert ground. Do you know why I go to these places? I think I belong there. It's a bit of an illness that I can't relinquish. I would really like to sit in a corner and read newspapers, but if I do, I'll go down the drain.

— Don McCullin, Tate Etc., issue 45, Spring 2019

Bruce Gilden is one of the most recognisable street photographers working today, his approach is identifiable at a glance. A member of Magnum Photos since 1998.

This is from an interview we recorded around 2020.

Cover of the Bulletin of the Odessa Photographic Society, 1912.

In 1912, at the celebration of the Society's twentieth anniversary, the decision was taken to found its own journal — the one we know as the Bulletin of the Odessa Photographic Society.

As the members of the Society wrote:

This celebration created in our Society that lift of spirit out of which, in part, the idea we are now carrying out — the publishing of a journal — was born. And the same celebration, more importantly still, was a day of taking stock of what had been lived through and achieved in photography by our Society, and in part by human thought itself.

Worth a look at the cover itself: a sailing ship, sea horses along the frame, an anchor below. None of that is decoration for its own sake. Odessa is a port city on the Black Sea, and the sea runs through everything the city produced — including the emblem its photographers chose for their journal.

In fieldwork — travel, expeditions — the equipment you actually use is often the compact one, or simply the one that's always in your pocket. There are plenty of reasons you might not have a camera on you: it isn't allowed, it costs extra, or you just didn't bring it. The chairman of the Odessa Photographic Society writes about exactly this:

>Shooting with a professional camera is second nature to any photographer. But on trips and travels there are often situations where you won't be allowed to photograph with a camera, or you'll be charged extra for it. Knowing this, many mobile phone manufacturers work to improve the cameras in their devices so they hold their own against professional ones.

>Here's one example — the Galaxy Z Fold3. Looking at these photographs, it's hard to tell they were taken with a phone.

— Photographs: Oleg Maltsev, chairman of the Odessa Photographic Society. Gascony, France.

So the question isn't whether a phone matches a camera. It's that the work gets done with whatever you have at hand — and that's true for a chairman on assignment as much as for a beginner.

Jan Grarup is one of the finest war correspondents working today. His photographs bring the viewer to the edge of human despair, dignity, suffering and hope. They matter to all of us, because they are a record of the time we live in — one we don't always dare to acknowledge.

Watch our full interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTGuh72nLTQ&t=477s

Hey everyone, I'll say it again — I'm a beginner. I photograph with a phone; I don't own a camera. That hasn't stopped me. But I did start wondering: what did the founders think about beginners? Could someone like me have come to them? Could you come with a cheap camera, or with no camera at all — just the cheapest phone, as long as there's a lens on it?

So I went looking for what they had to say. I found an article by G. S. Mikhailov-Muchkin, chairman of the Society, published in the Bulletin of the Odessa Photographic Society in August 1912. I thought about giving you the whole thing, but there's a great deal in it. Instead I've picked out the part that reassured me:

In a society, favourable conditions for work are created more easily than each person could create them alone. Coming into a society, everyone brings both their questions and their knowledge. By sharing what they know, some help others towards sounder work; others, drawing on the experience of those ahead of them, find an easier path to serious, reasoned work. And those who stand at the top of the ladder of photographic knowledge and art will come here too, to share what they have — for common work, work with an idea behind it, cannot fail to interest people of wide knowledge and long experience.

A society is a place of exchange; a society is also a school, where it is easier to study the varied means of photography and the conditions without which no artistic intention can be carried out. The level of work in a society depends on the amateurs themselves, on how actively each of them takes part in the common work.

— G. S. Mikhailov-Muchkin, "Amateur Photographers", Bulletin of the Odessa Photographic Society, No. 2, August 1912. The full article (original)

That's the reason this subreddit exists. Not to teach anyone, but to be a place where knowledge gets passed around — where you can find people who'll understand what you're asking, and help.