{"id":89755,"date":"2023-10-24T15:31:46","date_gmt":"2023-10-24T15:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/?p=89755"},"modified":"2023-10-24T19:27:08","modified_gmt":"2023-10-24T19:27:08","slug":"ukrainian-photojournalist-discusses-reporting-from-the-front-lines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/2023\/10\/ukrainian-photojournalist-discusses-reporting-from-the-front-lines\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukrainian photojournalist discusses reporting from the front lines"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

KINGSTON, R.I.<\/strong> \u2014Oct. 24, 2023\u2014When Russian forces surrounded the city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine in February 2022, photojournalist and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov says he learned a powerful lesson about the importance of information in the modern world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMariupol was in an information siege \u2026 not just a military siege,\u201d Chernov said. \u201cPeople [inside the city] didn\u2019t know if Ukraine still existed [as a country]. They didn\u2019t know what had happened to cities nearby.\u201d Even though food and water had not run out and bombs were not falling on the main part of the city (those things would all come later), the information vacuum in Mariupol was already taking a huge toll.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSociety collapsed completely,\u201d Chernov said. \u201cPeople started looting; they were fighting with each other. They were running after me when I tried to film this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Ammina Kothari, right, director of 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Harrington School of Communication and Media, presents Christiane Amanpour, CNN chief international anchor and a 溏心vlog免费B站 alumna, with a framed list of the renowned journalists who have presented the Amanpour Lecture over its 16 years. <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat showed me,\u201d he continued, \u201cthat information and journalism [are] sometimes more vital for our modern society that is dependent upon information than food and water. It is something that holds us all together. And in times when journalism is largely disregarded \u2026 it\u2019s important to understand actually how important [information] is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chernov was the featured speaker for the 16th Amanpour Lecture<\/a>, an annual lecture sponsored by the 溏心vlog免费B站\u2019s Harrington School of Communication and Media and endowed by Christiane Amanpour, CNN\u2019s chief international anchor and a 溏心vlog免费B站 alumna. Chernov\u2019s lecture on Friday, Oct. 20, came the day after he officially received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Mariupol. The footage that Chernov and his colleagues collected became the basis for the Academy Award nominated documentary 20 Days in Mariupol<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chernov told the audience in Edwards Hall that he had not originally set out to be a conflict journalist. In fact, he hadn\u2019t originally intended to be a journalist at all. In college he had studied computer science and only got into documentary photography and filmmaking by accident. It all started when Chernov was working as a technician installing a local communications network at a hospital. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOne day a doctor runs in the room and says, \u2018Hey, technician! Can you use the camera?\u2019\u201d Chernov recalled. \u201cI was like, \u2018yeah, sure.\u2019\u201d They ran to an operating room, where surgeons had just performed a new type of transplantation surgery. The doctors asked Chernov to photograph the patient and the work they had done. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat was the moment I knew I wanted to be a photographer\u2014a documentary photographer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t until years later, however, that Chernov became a war journalist. That happened when his native Ukraine became embroiled in conflict. The Ukrainian Revolution in 2014 was followed shortly after by the Donbas War and Russian annexation of Crimea. Then, in 2022, came Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which continues today. Chernov said he had little choice but to cover those events.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMost of the conflict journalists I know\u2014whole generations of conflict photographers and journalists\u2014became such because war came to their country,\u201d Chernov said. \u201cBecause if you\u2019re a journalist or documentarian in a country that is at war, what can you do? You become a war correspondent.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From his coverage of the Ukrainian Revolution and the Donbas War, Chernov went on to cover conflicts around the world, including the Syrian civil war and the Battle of Mosul, Iraq. He\u2019s also covered protests across Europe and beyond, which he said has led to more than one encounter with police, including particularly nasty experiences in Belarus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been beaten up by every single police force in Europe,\u201d he said. \u201cThey [each] have their own specialty. Usually European police [beat] you up and keep running \u2026 but the Belarusian police [beat] you up and then they arrest you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Early in his career, Chernov said he became briefly disillusioned with the contribution that conflict reporters can make. While covering the Donbas War, Chernov was there when a Russian missile struck a commercial aircraft, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, killing all 298 people aboard. As he filmed the destruction and loss of innocent life, he was sure that the footage would bring an abrupt end to the war. But it did not. In fact, he saw his footage being used by news organizations around the world with different narration\u2014sometimes making opposing claims about what actually happened. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was quite disillusioned generally by journalism at that point,\u201d Chernov said. He called a more experienced colleague and friend to talk about how to process those feelings. \u201cHe said, \u2018keep filming,\u2019\u201d Chernov recalled. \u201cIt might make a difference; you just don\u2019t know yet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something similar happened years later while covering Mariupol. Chernov and a few colleagues were the only international journalists left in the city, which was virtually cut off from the outside world. After bombs fell on a hospital in the center of the city, Chernov\u2019s cameras rolled as doctors tended to wounded children and rolled a badly injured pregnant woman out of the wreckage on a gurney. A police officer who helped Chernov find electricity and an internet connection to transmit his footage commented that surely the world\u2019s attention on the horrifying scene would put an end to the war. But by then, Chernov knew better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time, he\u2019s learned that it\u2019s not the journalist\u2019s job to stop a war, he says. Rather, the job is to tell the story as truthfully as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat we do is inform,\u201d he said. \u201cThen it\u2019s up to society to resolve these issues. There are a lot of institutions which were created specifically to do that, with the help of journalists.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Asked what advice he\u2019d give young journalists, Chernov said that they should approach their work in a way that combats a persistent problem of the modern world: indifference. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNot doing anything when so many horrible things are happening feels like you\u2019re helping the criminals to do what they do,\u201d he said. \u201cSo whatever form of art or journalism \u2026 if it helps to fight this indifference, [it\u2019s] incredibly valuable in the modern world. You don’t have to pick conflict journalism to do something. You just have to pick something that inspires people.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KINGSTON, R.I. \u2014Oct. 24, 2023\u2014When Russian forces surrounded the city of Mariupol in southern Ukraine in February 2022, photojournalist and filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov says he learned a powerful lesson about the importance of information in the modern world. \u201cMariupol was in an information siege \u2026 not just a military siege,\u201d Chernov said. \u201cPeople [inside the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":89756,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89755"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89791,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89755\/revisions\/89791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uri.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}