Unless noted, all images
©Artem Humilevskyi
Eleven
This is Dek Unu Magazine. In Esperanto, dek unu means "eleven." Eleven images from a single artist. Eleven artists in eleven solo issues in each publication year. Dek Unu publishes the work of a new artist-photographer in each issue. The artist's work and words are featured in individual focus as the sole purpose for each issue of the magazine. Unlike other arts and letters magazines which might look for work from a variety of artists to support an editorial staff's theme, at Dek Unu, theme and imagery are always each artist's own.
Since early antiquity, artists have recorded, documented, and often propagandized war. Across the centuries, as warfare became wholesale mechanized destruction, art responded. Secularism, humanism, skepticism, and cynicism began replacing the glorification of war and horrified artists took on some of each succeeding war’s costs and increasingly attempted to personalize war’s violence and futility, often with satire, sarcasm, and shocking affronts to convention. Those Greek black-figure heroes became Picasso’s unforgettable, screaming, black-and-white horse.
Photography, since Matthew Brady’s glass plates in the 1860s, has shown itself uniquely suited to depicting war’s brutality and has helped to prompt change, among many artists and viewers alike, from bland acceptance of war’s inevitability to open resistance. James Natchwey, who photographed conflict in Northern Ireland, Central America, and the Middle East, said, “I used to call myself a war photographer. Now I consider myself as an antiwar photographer.”
Ukrainian artist-photographer Artem Humilevskyi is an antiwar photographer. Where Natchwey went to his wars, war came to Humilevskyi with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, now more than two years ago. In Humilevskyi’s work, vistas of generalized damage are replaced by carefully crafted metaphorical tableaux; journalism is replaced by deeply affecting visual poetry. Casting himself and his family, naked and vulnerable, and his country’s fertile beauty, in danger of ruin, he is, like fine artists back through time, not only pleading for an end to the war but also offering his art as a counter weapon. By turns caustic, humorous, appalled, and sad, Humilevskyi’s deeply personal images offer both resistance and hope, the essential parts of any path to peace.