War through the Camera Lens

Georgi Totev and Georgi Kozhuharov are two of the most dynamic war correspondents working in Bulgaria today. They are known for their reporting on Syria and Ukraine, in particular their recent series "Notes from Ukraine," which ran in Dnevnik. Kozhuharov graduated from the National Vocational School of Printing and Photography in 2015; he recalls looking through yearbooks of leading photography agencies when he was in 10th or 11th grade and telling himself that someday he would become a war correspondent. One of Totev's earliest memories is of the media coverage of the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and he is generally interested in how people who lived together peacefully can suddenly start killing each other. Today, the two are working on a large-scale project about the last survivors of the Bulgarian socialist-era labor camps, but for now they are keeping this project under wraps. In April they plan to return to Ukraine, and in the meantime they are awaiting confirmation to travel to Afghanistan to cover life there since the Taliban takeover.

How did you start working as a team and how do you make it work?

Georgi Totev: We teamed up in 2015 for our project in Eastern Ukraine, in the Donbass. Before that, Georgi was more involved with photography, while I had started working with video at bTV. I had already done a project on Syria, and one on Iraqi Kurdistan, near the capital, where there was heavy fighting with the Islamic State. In military conflicts, there usually aren’t many people working in the field. Apart from Georgi, I have also tried working with other reporters in the field. And the experience was not good.

Georgi Kozhuharov: War coverage is extremely specific and complex. In a war zone, it’s not enough to act like a professional. You have to get along with the person next to you, help each other out, give each other advice, discuss, argue and ultimately act in a way that works for everyone. In these places, security is uncertain at best and you have to count on both of you knowing what you’re doing.

GT: Speaking of which, when we're working in the field, our team is bigger than just the two of us. In the field, we often work with a fixer, or a translator, or a driver. Sometimes one person does all three jobs. Our safety is mostly in the hands of this local – no matter how prepared we are, he knows more than we do.

GK: What’s really interesting is that we’ve found some of our best contacts by going to bars (if there are any, since there aren’t any bars in the Arab world). The last time we were in Ukraine we joked that next time we go to a place like this, we should just sit around in a bar for three days and try to talk to people.

What has war taught you about human nature?

GT: In times of war, both the worst and the best traits of the human psyche are manifested at the same time. You hear the story of a Syrian soldier taking out the heart of an opposing soldier and eating it raw. You see superhuman gestures of mercy, of brotherhood. The other thing is that people are terribly resilient and can adapt to any living situation. Imagine a city that is constantly being bombed, with battles taking place on the outskirts.

And still, people keep living their lives. Or, failing that, they make all sorts of attempts to live normally. We had just arrived in Kyiv, we heard the air raid sirens and were worried about where we would hide. However, most people had gotten used to these sounds by now and continued their daily activities. It's like nothing was happening.

GK: It is precisely in these most difficult moments that you learn a lot about a person, because the situation is extreme, and you act instinctively and somehow primitively. Speaking of civilian life near the front line, I can think of one case in Aleppo. There was serious fighting, in the midst of the battle for the city. I went to photograph a protest that passed down the street very quickly. I was at the market. The fighting was no more than two kilometers away. At the market, however, people were playing chess, others were buying bread, the children were happy, running around the street, kicking a ball. It was surreal because then you get up, you go to the front line and you see it happening not more than five minutes away by car. You are teleported to a whole other dimension.

How different were your two trips to Ukraine?

GT: In 2015, from our point of view and from the point of view of those in power in Kyiv, there was no war. The Russians called it a war, and the Ukrainians called it an anti-terrorist operation, because there really were pro-Russian separatists in southern Ukraine who were trying to carve off a fairly solid chunk of the country. A few years later, things turned around, Moscow claims it's a special operation, the authorities in Kyiv say it is a war. But the power in Kyiv has also changed. In 2015, its work with journalists was different, now it is clear that it has a very strategic policy for working with the media. 

GK: Which is both good and bad. Now you can contact the authorities more easily. We wrote to them about the mass graves and literally 30 seconds later they sent us the location of a mass grave where work was being done. And we could go there directly. They want as much coverage as possible of what is happening, but there are a lot of limitation - if a rocket falls somewhere, journalists are not allowed to take pictures. 

GT: But perhaps one of the biggest changes is that before, the people who could see the war were the people in eastern Ukraine. People in the central parts of the country, in Western Ukraine, mostly knew that something was happening, they heard about it. The war was far away because Ukraine is a big country. So that's something that has changed. People all over Ukraine have now understood that war is war.

GK: In 2019, I was on a trip to Kyiv, I was talking to locals at a bar and I became curious about what was happening in Eastern Ukraine – Donbass, Azov. In 2015, we had done a big piece about the Azov battalion, they allowed us into the base, we took pictures, we interviewed them.

GT: Yes, we were accused of being paid in rubles back then... 

GK: I asked them about these things and they couldn't really get what that was about.

GT: It ended with a truce, but in reality Eastern Ukraine remained a pressing issue. They would start shooting every now and then...

GK: Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like they tried not to kill each other too much.

GT: I also thought of something else. In 2015, the Ukrainian hryvnia had fallen against the dollar seven times. The economy was in total collapse. Everything was dirt cheap from our point of view, but the locals couldn't afford it. Now the economy looked super vibrant, even though most of the manufacturing plants are not currently open. 

GK: In 2015, we wanted to exchange 100 dollars for hryvnia. The head of the exchange office came out to negotiate with us. 

GT: And they gave us this giant wad of money. (Laughs.) And then we stayed in a four-star hotel. It was ridiculous.

How can reporting like yours help fight fake news? Though anyone could cut three minutes of some of your material and…

GT (laughing): That has happened.

GK: It's our job to publish things that we are certain happened the way we show them.

GT: You can't be sure.

GK: No, but we try at least not to give our own assessment. Most of the people we interviewed in Ukraine now, in the most affected places, are absolutely random people. We go there, we meet a person on the street, talk to him and play the recording what he told us. No journalistic musings added as a voice-over. Two weeks ago I asked Goran Tomasevic the same question, he’s the greatest military photographer. And he said that his job was to take pictures, to share the information that he had – that a bomb had fallen here, etc. If you don't know who dropped it, you don't say who dropped it in the photo description. You can’t control what will happen to this image in the media later. Perhaps now there is more opportunity for fact-checking and the end user can do the work to see if this is true or not. But our task is, when we release something, to be certain that we are not lying.

GT: Usually there is a project we want to do and we look for ways to make it happen, not the other way around. It's no accident that our working model is like this – it allows us to choose topics that are important to us and present them as we believe they should be presented. As for fighting fake news, we aim to present as many points of view as possible. This is extremely difficult when you’re covering conflicts. If you are on one side of the front line, it’s hard to go to the other sid

I can give an example from our work on the Syrian conflict. Georgi’s first visit, and mine after that, was to those whom we called rebels, but the government in Damascus considered them terrorists. From our Western perspective then, they were the good guys fighting against the dictator. A little later, however, things changed and many of these same people joined the Islamic State. Later, we went back to Syria and when they liberated Raqqa, we covered the fight against Islamic State from the Kurdish side. Back then they were the good guys, they kicked out the Islamic State, and we decided that the best thing was, since we actually worked on the Syrian issue from 2012 to 2017, to see what the regime in Damascus would say about it. But they told us that since we had not covered the conflict objectively, they would not issue us visas. I say the regime, but to them it is the government. It is not always possible to also present other points of view , but it is our goal to tell people that they exist.

GK: We even got black stamps from Ukraine after we returned from Donbass. I don't know how long after the ban fell. GT: A few months. Officially, the reason was ‘support for terrorists and biased coverage of the situation in Donbass’.

What journalistic trends and innovations will be popular in the coming years? 

GK: I think that reporters are doing one of the most important jobs right now. Something happens, you go to that location, you try to find out what, why, how it happened and who did it. So that someone can wake up the next day and see what happened the day before somewhere else entirely – that is very valuable to me.

At the beginning of the war, I was stuck at home with Covid and I immediately saw several of my fellow photojournalists rush over there right away. They were in Kyiv and filming a day and a half later. My first job every morning was to look at what they posted on Facebook. There will certainly be very interesting art projects and more conceptual work coming out afterwards, but this type of pure reporting is what society needs to be as well informed as possible.

GT: New technologies can be used in journalistic work in order to present a less biased point of view. They have been using 360-degree cameras to cover protests and mass events for years now. Imagine a photojournalist going to a protest. He can photograph children on their parents' shoulders, grandmothers with Bulgarian flags, and then the protest will look one way. But he can also photograph the overflowing trash cans after it's over, with beer cans or tiny bottles of vodka. Releasing one or the other set of pictures would give people a different impression of the event. With a 360-degree camera, the viewer can choose in which direction to look. Their view is not limited. This is something that should certainly be introduced more into reporting, it would raise the bar.