“An inconvenient place”, by Jonathan Littell and Antoine d’Agata, Gallimard, 350 pages, €21, digital €15.
A quiet street, “pretty” facades, shops, then “suddenly” a destroyed house. Further back, uprooted trees, wrecked cars, a piece of metal creaking in the wind. Or this cellar, which bears the marks of the repeated rapes of several women by Russian soldiers and the murder of one of them, who was found after her departure “with her head exploded, legs and stomach slashed with a knife.”
In May 2022, the writer Jonathan Littell and the photographer Antoine d’Agata are in Boutcha, on the outskirts of Kiev, for “M Le magazine du Monde”. They have the plan just published by the New York Times about the murders carried out by Russian forces during their occupation of the city from February 27th to March 31st. According to the Prosecutor General of Ukraine, the bodies of 637 civilians were exhumed, that is, 12% of the population remaining there after the start of Russian aggression on February 24. Life goes on with a strange gentleness, but the explosion of crime reappears everywhere as the two men walk the streets. With a mix of text and images, “A Disadvantageous Place,” the book they derived from this and other reports, is a chilling topographical investigation.
Jonathan Littell observes and listens, collects testimonies, compares them, interprets them, places them in the places he examines. Antoine d’Agata at his side captures a face, the gesture of a woman telling a story, an open grave, a torture room, bodies thrown to the ground. Through his art of raw appearance – tight, dense shots, low light, as if trapped by bodies and materials – the photographer invents a visual language that brings to light the concrete reality of war as effectively as the precise, hammered, obsessive one Language of Littell.
But he also shares the helplessness of the witness who comes too late. A sense of incurable distance runs through this passionate and cautious book, in which acceptance of being on the threshold of unimaginable terror becomes a method of investigation. That was the core of the project that initially took them to Ukraine. It was the beginning of 2021. At the suggestion of a friend, Jonathan Littell decided to write a book about Babi Yar in northern Kiev, where 100,000 people, two-thirds Jews, became Jews from September 29, 1941 until the end of the Nazi occupation of the city in November 1943 murdered by the Germans with the help of Ukrainian auxiliary troops.
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