Last May, NHPR spoke with Seacoast-based photographer Patrick Patterson after he traveled to Ukraine's border with Poland to document people seeking refuge from the war.
Patterson stayed just three months in the U.S. before going back to Ukraine. This time he stayed in Kyiv, and traveled to different regions to document the war. Fourteen months later, he’s returned to New Hampshire.
He joined NHPR’s All Things Considered host Julia Furukawa to talk about his time in Ukraine and what he has planned now that he’s back in the Granite State.
Transcript
Patrick, when we last checked in with you, you sent us some audio diaries from Ukraine last July, over a year ago. Could you describe what your average day looked like when you were in Ukraine?
It really depended where I was. If I was in Kyiv, I could be starting my morning off in a cafe, eating pastries and drinking coffee. An hour later, I could be running down the street under shelling.
Millions of people wake up every morning and go to work and live their lives as normal as they can. Banks are open. Restaurants are open, cafes [are open]. And then it all stops as soon as the missiles start to come in. The difference was in the first three or four weeks of the war, the air raid sirens would sound, and people living in Kyiv would seek shelter. But for a long extended period of time, it just became normal. It was a background noise. The air siren would go off, and people would say things under their breath about Russia. People wouldn't really go to the shelters. I would just continue my normal walk.
In May, that really changed. Russia had increased their attacks, particularly with Kyiv, specifically in May. I found myself some evenings, running small children down the street at 3 A.M., as missiles were flying over our heads or drones [were] exploding outside my window.
And so even though every day Ukrainians are waking up and going to work, their normalcy is thinly coated. Deep down in your soul, there is no normalcy. It's going to take a long time to heal.
Since returning home, you've been sharing some of your work. One of the stories I saw that you've talked about is about a woman named Galina. Can you tell us a bit about her and how her story relates to what's happening in Ukraine?
Galina is in her late 80s, maybe early 90s. It was kind of hard to get the exact age from her. But she was born into Holodomor, which was the man-made famine from Stalin, where almost 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. She lived in the same village that was under Nazi occupation during the Second World War. And in February of last year, she watched Russian tanks roll through her field behind her home. So this is a woman that has experienced so much trauma, so much war. Today, there's children that are replicas of Galina when she was little and now these children are being born into new occupation from Russia.
How did you form connections with people like Galena? What was it like to approach them?
Sometimes I walk up to an individual knowing that I'm asking people to share their stories. And their stories are the worst thing that has ever happened to them in their entire life. And sometimes I don't. Sometimes those stories just come and they're shared. People come to you and ask, or beg for you to just listen. They want the world to see what's happening there.
Now that you've returned home, you have a lot of work to share. What are your plans to engage people?
My photographs are windows into the stories of those who have experienced war crimes and have lived under Russian occupation. I feel a great responsibility to carry these messages and share them through gallery exhibitions, and through speaking engagements and academic lectures. These are the stories, these personal human stories, that have the possibility of creating change.
More of Patterson's photos can be found at his website.
