The Ukraine War Through the Lens of a Kean University Professor
By Lenny K. Mata Cuevas | Published Nov 18, 2022
A few years ago, On February 10, 2017, Kean University received the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine at Wilkins Theater. An approximately two-hour event listening to Rachmaninoff’s, Sibelius’, and Stravinsky’s classic compositions.
In the same year, Kean University Professor Jacqueline Silberbush visited her grandparents’ homeland, a small town in Europe’s western region named Buchach.
“At the time, it was Poland, but the borders changed, so now the town exists in Ukraine,” Silberbush first explained via email. “My grandparents were Jewish and left right before the Holocaust, and I was interested to see what remained of Jewish life in that region if any.”
For Silberbush, the trip was a success. She made great friends and memories, and it was not a surprise that she returned to the United States hoping to visit once again. Now, five years after the bands’ performance, most of what we hear on campus about Ukraine is news about the War and its consequences.
The same news motivated Silberbush to return to her roots, ironically what made her grandparents leave in the first place. Nevertheless, this time she was not there just as a granddaughter but as a storyteller, artist, and photographer.
“While I was there, I made a few really good friends and stayed with many wonderful people,” Silberbush remembered. “When the war started, I felt drawn to go back. It was hard to watch from afar a country that I knew and loved turning into shambles. I felt like maybe if I went, I could help in some small way.”
By June 2022, Silberbush was helping in the only way she knew, with her Leica camera documenting the stories of Ukraine’s civilians –victims of the atrocities of the war. She met with men, women, and children living in Lviv, one of the largest cities in the western region and the sixth largest in Ukraine.
Though connecting with them was not always an essay task, she soon learned that in the circumstances like the current ones, there are two kinds of people: the ones who don’t want to share anything at all and the ones who can’t wait to find the right medium to tell the world their stories.
“Some people don’t want to share anything. They are really going through a traumatic experience. They don’t want to be pictured in that way; they don’t want to be remembered in that way,” Silberbush said. Then there are the people “who want to share and were interesting into sharing their story. People who want to get that information out.”
With such a mindset, the artist began visiting places and shooting along the way. Her images immortalized the new normal for Ukrainians, beyond its collapsing buildings and walls destroyed by gunshots.
The stories of moms and their children at shelter centers, nurses and volunteers in hospitals, children in recovery camps, soldiers saying goodbye to their families, and funerals, so many of them, she explained.
“When I first went to the cemetery, I was really overcome with emotion just because of how fresh everything was,” she recalls. “There were just more graves and more graves, and I had never seen anything like that before, where you see five people dying every day and mounts of dirt just waiting for people to be buried.”
Though her visual essay was taking shape and she knew it was her responsibility as a photographer to make those images public, she couldn’t help herself from battling emotional burden and moral conflict. The closeness with the subjects and their stories made her question the rightness of her doing.
“It was weird at times to have a camera out and photograph people whose lives have been destroyed,” she said. “Having to photograph them like that can be uncomfortable but also just really very sad.”
As an individual, the professor also dealt with fear, she had to worry for her safety, as well. She explained that when she first arrived, she downloaded an app that would alert her if something was happening. However, after the app failed to work effectively, she turned off the notifications until she could find someone to help her translate the warnings correctly.
One day while traveling by train from Kyiv to another city, the same app started ringing in other passengers’ phones. She was surprised when her phone started making noise as well, thinking she was sure her app was off.
“That was really unnerving because I had turned off the alerts, I had turned off my alarms,” She said. “I realized that this was a much more serious alert. Based on tracking of my phone, they could figure out that I was in the region or there was some serious matter that was beyond some application you have in your phone.”
It was unsettling whenever the sirens went off to alert the citizens they should seek shelter to protect themselves, but on the train, there was nowhere to go and nothing else to do but to wait, Silberbush explained.
“You tense up when the alarm goes off because you don’t know what will happen. You don’t know where it’s going to hit,” she said.
Fortunately, nothing ever happened. At least not near her. Until this day, she couldn’t tell for sure what made the sirens turn on that day on the train.
In the same way, Silberbush photographed moments of fear; she had the chance to photograph moments of joy. Shooting in recovery camps for children, at weddings, ballet, and even a salsa dance class.
The images collected during those brief moments of happiness project another face of Ukraine’s ways of life. It also helped her to understand how they confront the situation as a united country.
“The unity of the country is something we don’t have here right now,” she said. “[Overthere], everyone is on the same side right now. Watching that happen and people bent together was just a unique experience.”
Her pictures resulted in a photographic essay titled “Through the Lens,” recently presented at the Human Rights Institute as part of the Galleries at Kean series. She talked about her expectations towards the project and what she would like people to consider it.
“I want people to connect with the photos in a way that isn’t just out of pity but more as a community,” Silberbush said. “This could happen anywhere, and it could happen to any of us. We are far removed from it, but I want people to feel common humanity.”