Mark Neville - Stop Tanks with Books

I have never before finished a review and then had to sit down to almost entirely rewrite it, but I have also never watched an authoritarian, nuclear armed super power launch a full military invasion against a neighbouring democracy. That’s what happened in the early hours of the 24^th February 2022, as Russia attacked Ukraine in what is widely seen as an attempt to bring that democratic state back into Moscow’s orbit by force. This invasion has been at least a decade in the making, since 2014 when popular protests overthrew the previous Russia aligned government of Viktor Yanukovych. Soon afterwards photographs began to appear online of unidentified soldiers, later identified as Russian special forces, occupying the Crimean Peninsula which juts out into Black Sea from the southern end of Ukraine.

Photography had one of its early encounters with conflict on that same stretch of land in 1855, when the British photographer Roger Fenton photographed the cannonballs and encampments of the Crimean War, work which saw him retrospectively hailed as the first conflict photographer. But Fenton’s work also illustrates the perennial challenges of making wartime images which seek to speak to the truth of those exceptional and extreme circumstances. Not least the difficulty of a lone photographer making sense of sometimes fast-moving events, and the vast dangers of misinterpretation, misrepresentation and misinformation, already problems in peace time, but doubly so in war where, as British politician Arthur Ponsonby memorably observed, truth is always the first casualty.

Stop Tanks with Books was conceived in large part as a response to the build-up of Russian troops on Ukraine’s borders, as an attempt to rally the international community to Ukraine’s cause and pressure Russia against taking military action to resolve its fears about NATO expansion into eastern Europe. Even as that goal becomes a redundant one, Neville’s work remains a rallying cry for a European democracy under attack.

The work of the British photographer Mark Neville both faces and seeks to address some of the same challenges, in the same country. Neville isn’t a stranger to conflict, having been an official war artist with the British Army in Afghanistan in 2011, an experience which led him in a roundabout way to Ukraine. His work in Helmand came to focus on the largely unacknowledged and devastating impact of post-traumatic stress disorder amongst British troops, a condition which Neville also developed as a consequence of his time embedded with them.

While he found a lukewarm official reception for the resultant work in Britain (with the UK Border Force impounding 500 copies of the book for unclear reasons), Battle Against Stigma chimed with the experiences of ex-service personnel here and abroad. In particular it drew interest from a Ukrainian veterans hospital struggling to address the psychological consequences of the ongoing fighting in the country’s east, where Russian backed separatists had been in conflict with the central Ukrainian government since the same time as the annexation of Crimea.

In 2020 Neville relocated from London to Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and just over a year later found that city and country surrounded on three sides by a vast build-up of Russian troops, claimed to be engaged in exercises, but widely suspected to be preparing for an invasion which has now finally occurred. His book was conceived in large part as a response to this, as an attempt to rally the international community to Ukraine’s cause and pressure Russia against taking military action to resolve its fears about NATO expansion into eastern Europe. Even as that goal becomes a redundant one, Neville’s work remains a rallying cry for a European democracy under attack.

This is a book of extreme contrasts, between the utter normalcy of day-to-day life, and absurd otherworld of war, and in this sense, when he was making it, it presented two possible versions of the future for Ukraine.

This is a book of extreme contrasts, between the utter normalcy of day-to-day life, and absurd otherworld of war, and in this sense, when he was making it, it presented two possible versions of the future for Ukraine. The normality and familiarity of life in the country is captured with the same eye that made Neville’s name with his work in British towns like Port Glasgow and Corby, and often enough the photographs in this book feel as if they could have been taken in the United Kingdom. Photographs of families at Black Sea beaches, could just as easily have been taken in New Brighton or Margate, not Odessa. They remind us of the need to resist the fatalist logic that Ukraine is ‘naturally’ part of Russia’s sphere of influence. As Neville’s photographs show, this is a dynamic European state with the geopolitical misfortune to be caught between two opposing military blocs, and if we give it up, we are giving up a part of ourselves.

Alongside these more ordinary images, Neville’s book also depicts the possibility of another grim future for Ukraine, one of a devastating conflict which harks back to some of the worst moments in recent European history. In one photograph a Ukrainian soldier stands in a trench at a part of the frontline known as Stalingrad because it has been subjected to such heavy bombardment that it has started to resemble the razed Soviet city of the same name, and truly he looks as if he could have been there, with his grizzled features and resigned stare. Other photographs focus on the civilian impact; even before the invasion Ukraine has more internally displaced people than the entire population of Estonia, with 140,000 people leaving Crimea alone since its annexation, and ten times that number displaced across the country as a whole, numbers which are now undoubtedly exploding, and include Neville himself.

Photographers often talk in vague terms about the idea of changing the world, usually by changing people’s views on critical issues in the hope that leads to change in policy, behaviour, or at the ballot box.

Photographers often talk in vague terms about the idea of changing the world, usually by changing people’s views on critical issues in the hope that leads to change in policy, behaviour, or at the ballot box. Neville’s work has frequently taken a very focused approach to this, in part through the targeted way he has frequently disseminated the results, for example delivering copies of a book to an entire town in one case, or posting them to environmental policy makers in another. Stop Tanks with Books is no exception, and the stated aim of the project is to reach international decision makers and help to rally support for Ukraine. Reflecting this, the book opens with a focused call to action, which sets out both the stakes in this confrontation, a set of proposals to address it, and directly counters some of the lies which are currently being used to justify the invasion, including the claim that Ukraine is a Nazi state engaged in genocide against Russian citizens in the separatist east.

At least on paper, rallying the international community in defence of Ukraine shouldn’t be a difficult task, even more so now. However, as Neville writes in the book, “principles only mean something if you stick to them when they become inconvenient” and even with Russian tanks on the outskirts of Kyiv, there still remains a remarkable unwillingness by some European states even to impose sanctions which might have any sort of economic blowback for their own citizens. It’s also worth remembering how lax attitudes towards Russia have been even since the invasion of Crimea. The London ‘laundromat’ has facilitated an endless flow of questionable Russian money into the country, while even the Prime minister has allowed himself to be wined and dined by a succession of oligarchs and their scions, including the billionaire son of a former chief KGB officer. We knew what Putin’s Russia had become long ago, the fact is we took the money anyway, and now we have to face the consequences of that at home and abroad.

A friend gifted Neville the title for his work when he told the photographer that that “books can’t stop tanks” and this attitude certainly reflects a widespread cynicism about the ability of photography, photojournalism, and art to lead to concrete change, particularly in the hard realm of geopolitics. The cynics will say that events of the last few days confirm this, but Neville’s work remains a powerful case for a free, democratic Ukraine, and the jury remains out on the power of photography to impact world affairs, in part because this type of attitudinal change is often simply so hard to measure. One thing is for certain though, and that is that if you believe that work like this can’t have an influence on the course of world events then that belief swiftly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. However seductive it might be, the one thing that will never stop a tank, is pessimism.