Photographer uses Ukrainian soil as pigment in haunting images of wartime life

Living in Kyiv, Ukraine, during wartime, Valery Veduta grew accustomed to the daily sounds of air raid warnings and the sight of tanks and rocket launchers. However, the artist has what he calls his own “weapon of choice”: photography.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, he has been documenting his family’s life through a photographic diary shot with a large-format film camera and tripod. He processes the photos in his bathroom, using Ukrainian soil as a pigment to give them a dreamy, almost nostalgic feel. Then digitize them.

The mixed media images in his family album War Times—now sold as NFTs on the Voice digital art marketplace—do not directly document the invasion and its horrors. Veduta, 39, thinks of them more as a poem about the impact of war on ordinary people at the intersection of military conflict and everyday life.

The images do have a poetic quality, thanks to rubber bichromate, a 19th-century photographic printing process that can create picturesque images from photographic negatives.

On one, titled Calm, not a calm day, Veduta’s wife and 5-year-old son sit playing cards in front of a window. At first glance, it’s a peaceful domestic scene. But look more closely and you’ll notice intersecting lines on the window panes. This is scotch tape that the family taped to the window to prevent glass from flying into the room in the event of shock waves from an explosion.

Another image, called Library and War Machine, captures just that: a destroyed Russian war machine in front of a public library, the ordinary juxtaposed with anything but the ordinary in a strangely calm style.

Veduta’s work has appeared in Vogue Italia, Vogue Greece, Vogue Portugal and Harpers Bazaar, and in PhotoVogue, Conde Nast’s international contemporary photography database. The war interferes with his business and his son’s kindergarten. A rocket destroyed a playground in the center where his child was playing.

“Everything is different, but somehow now I’m forcing myself to do something from ‘normal life’ to feel alive and normal,” the artist says of his photographic series, which sells on Voice for $300 NFT (approx £268 , AUD 480).

The gum bichromate printing process involves coating paper with an emulsion made from powdered chemicals; a dry gummy substance called gum arabic; and water-soluble pigment — in Veduta’s case, soil from the soil of his war-torn country. When exposed to ultraviolet light, the resinous substance hardens and the residual bichromate and gum arabic are washed away. Before it hardens, however, the photographer can brush or reshape the physical texture of the print to add a new element of expressiveness.

“I find it poetic that I have to use poison (that’s dichromate) and soil to create my images, and the poison has to be washed away,” says Veduta.

Veduta’s images are among those sold on Voice as a result of a month-long virtual “NFT residency.” Through grants and workshops, the art platform for emerging artists guides PhotoVogue artists from 29 countries in navigating the Web3 world, which can be defined in two ways, as my CNET colleague Daniel Van Boom explains.

“The quick and easy description is integrated into the blockchain internet, or the internet where cryptocurrencies and NFTs are built into the platforms you use,” Van Boom writes. “The more complex but more specific way to think about Web3 is as a consumer-owned Internet. This is the dream of crypto boosters who say that the integration of blockchain technology will lead to an egalitarian internet.”

The NFT residency focuses on the overarching theme of equality and justice, with the artwork produced touching on topics such as the long-term effects of the COVID pandemic on children, the effects of a recent major oil spill, and, in Veduta’s case, the challenges of living in a war zone. New art from the residency will drop in October and November.

The soil that colors Veduta’s work mostly comes from the same place, but sometimes, as in the case of the bombed-out playground, the dirt directly connects to the image it colors.

“My child was raised on this playground. This was our place,” says the artist. “So I took a picture of a crater and collected dirt from there.”

Looking ahead, Veduta hopes for the day when she can use a different pigment to color her images — clay from Sivash, a saltwater lake in the Sea of ​​Azov that separates Crimea from Ukraine. Veduta’s parents have a home on the shores of a lake whose black clay is known for its healing properties.

“One day,” he says, “I will photograph my homeland and print photos with this healing clay.”