PHOTO: Ivor Prickett-No Home from War

Oleksandr Kornienko’s family home, in the village of Velyka Dymerka just north of Brovary, was destroyed in a rocket attack in early March, 2022, Velyka Dymerka, Ukraine, Photography from the series “Fighting to Exist”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett Irish photojournalist Ivor Prickett spends extensive periods of time in the war zones he documents, producing hard-hitting yet quietly contemplative images showing conflict and its aftermath across the world. In many ways his work has always sat somewhere between a more gallery-oriented style of documentary photography and photojournalism, Prickett says: “I think that is why it stands out and is in some way unique”.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Collezione Maramotti Archive

With fifty photographs taken in conflict zones from 2006 to 2022, “No Home from War” is the largest show and the first Italian exhibition by photojournalist Ivor Prickett. After studying Documentary Photography at the University of Wales, Newport, Prickett began working in Europe and the Middle East, striving to convey and denounce the effects of war on the civilian population – on the people whose lives it ravages and uproots, whatever side they may be on. Initially focused on the private, domestic sphere of war’s long-term social and humanitarian consequences, Prickett’s gaze has shifted over the years towards places of forced migration and lands where people seek refuge, and then to the front lines of combat zones. The home – both a real place, and a pivotal inner space of protection, identity, and rootedness – is a central theme that crops up in different forms throughout his work. The exhibition retraces Prickett’s career to date, following the chronological order of the photos. From 2006 to 2010, his work in the Balkans and the Caucasus centred above all on individuals and small family groups, as units of resistance embodying the struggle for re-existence. In his photos of the Serbian minority in Croatia, displaced by the war in ’90s, or his portraits of the Georgian Mingrelian population in Abkhazia, one can feel a loneliness as commonplace as it is profound. It emanates from scenes and individuals hanging in precarious equilibrium, left alone to grapple with their history as they try to rebuild it, searching for a sense of home, family and community in situations that are still extremely fragile. The humanitarian crisis sparked by the war in Syria, with millions of refugees in the Middle East and migrants in Europe, is the subject of a body of work that Prickett made between 2013 and 2015. Here, his focus shifts from private life to the outside world: it captures a time when people were being forced to move, filling refugee camps or risking their lives to embark on journeys into the unknown. Prickett also documented the brutal war against the Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria from 2016 to 2018, eliminating every spatial and temporal distance from the scene of conflict and taking photos on the front lines, where he was embedded with Iraqi forces. In this decimated landscape, from images of rubble and destruction – where everything seems pulverized or blanketed in the dust of a recent explosion – delicate scraps of (extra)ordinary humanity emerge. With the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022, Prickett’s eye initially lingered on the collapsed buildings, the empty holes left by bombings: these vast architectural wounds become material, metaphysical signs of how domestic and personal space is being destroyed, opening a window onto the atrocity of the war now unfolding in Europe. Through the photographer’s eyes, we see Ukrainian soldiers silhouetted like solemn figures wrapped in darkness, their profiles visible only in the beam of their own flashlights. And civilians once again find themselves in a shared state of pain and uncertainty, incredulous at the repetition of horror. Through his framing and composition of the shots, and his choice not to alter the available light from which the figures, settings and details emerge, Prickett creates iconic images that echo classic subjects and motifs from religious iconography and art history. The love and virtues of nameless saints, the many manifestations of the Pietà, the simplicity of a bucolic scene, the mystery of the voyage towards a hazy Island of the Dead, the drama of Caravaggio and the earthy spirituality of Rembrandt: Prickett channels their symbolic and aesthetic power into a reflection on our era. Our impression that these photographs are somehow staged clashes with our awareness that the subjects are dramatically real, in a dissonance that elevates these fragments of worlds to universal metaphors and urges us to take a stance.

Photo: Oleksandr Kornienko’s family home, in the village of Velyka Dymerka just north of Brovary, was destroyed in a rocket attack in early March, 2022, Velyka Dymerka, Ukraine , Photography from the series “Fighting to Exist”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

Info: Collezione Maramotti, via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia, Italy, Duration: 30/4-30/7/2023, Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 14:30-18:30, Sat-Sun 10:30-18:30, www.collezionemaramotti.org/

Ivor Prickett, Slavica Eremic feeds her baby son Nikola while her husband sleeps. Slavica married Serbian Nebojsa when she was nineteen. Nebojsa had returned to Croatia after several years of exile in Serbia only to find his family home inhabited by a Bosnian refugee. The young family now live in Nebojsa’s grandmother’s house. 2006, Jurga, Croatia, Photography from the series “Returning Home – Croatia”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, Slavica Eremic feeds her baby son Nikola while her husband sleeps. Slavica married Serbian Nebojsa when she was nineteen. Nebojsa had returned to Croatia after several years of exile in Serbia only to find his family home inhabited by a Bosnian refugee. The young family now live in Nebojsa’s grandmother’s house. 2006, Jurga, Croatia, Photography from the series “Returning Home – Croatia”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

 

 

Ivor Prickett, Thirty-seven-year-old Peda Radic is from Knin in southern Croatia but was displaced by Operation Storm in 1995. Peda lives alone in the Rtanj collective centre. His last remaining family have turned their backs on him due to his drinking problem., 2007, Rtanj, Serbia, Photography from the series “Returning Home – Croatia”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, Thirty-seven-year-old Peda Radic is from Knin in southern Croatia but was displaced by Operation Storm in 1995. Peda lives alone in the Rtanj collective centre. His last remaining family have turned their backs on him due to his drinking problem. 2007, Rtanj, Serbia, Photography from the series “Returning Home – Croatia”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

 

 

Ivor Prickett, A Mingrelian Georgian woman waits to sell a piglet at Gali market. 2010, Gali, Abkhazia, Photography from the series “Returning Home – Abkhazia”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, A Mingrelian Georgian woman waits to sell a piglet at Gali market. 2010, Gali, Abkhazia, Photography from the series “Returning Home – Abkhazia”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

 

 

Ivor Prickett, Tengo Inalishvili’s mother makes a spicy paste from dried chilies at the Inlaishvili family home in the village of Rechxi. 2010, Rechxi, Abkhazia, Photography from the series “Returning Home – Abkhazia”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, Tengo Inalishvili’s mother makes a spicy paste from dried chilies at the Inlaishvili family home in the village of Rechxi. 2010, Rechxi, Abkhazia, Photography from the series “Returning Home – Abkhazia”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

 

 

Ivor Prickett, Thirty-five-year-old Syrian refugee Susan from Aleppo collapses from seasickness and fatigue after crossing the Aegean from Turkey to Lesbos with her husband and three children. 2015, Lesbos, Greece, Photography from the series “Seeking Shelter. Part II – West”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, Thirty-five-year-old Syrian refugee Susan from Aleppo collapses from seasickness and fatigue after crossing the Aegean from Turkey to Lesbos with her husband and three children. 2015, Lesbos, Greece, Photography from the series “Seeking Shelter. Part II – West”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

 

 

Ivor Prickett, Syrian refugees living in the Fayda tented settlement in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley stand outside the shacks where they live beside a polluted stream. 2014, Beqaa, Lebanon, Photography from the series “Seeking Shelter. Part I - East”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, Syrian refugees living in the Fayda tented settlement in Lebanon’s Beqaa valley stand outside the shacks where they live beside a polluted stream. 2014, Beqaa, Lebanon, Photography from the series “Seeking Shelter. Part I – East”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

 

 

Ivor Prickett, A man collapses out of an armoured vehicle at a first aid station in East Mosul, holding the body of his younger brother, who was killed moments earlier in an ISIS mortar attack. 2016, Mosul, Iraq, Photography from the series “End of the Caliphate”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, A man collapses out of an armoured vehicle at a first aid station in East Mosul, holding the body of his younger brother, who was killed moments earlier in an ISIS mortar attack. 2016, Mosul, Iraq, Photography from the series “End of the Caliphate”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

 

 

Ivor Prickett, Mohammed Haj Ali is busy in the run-up to the Muslim holiday of Eid, cutting the hair of some of the few residents who had returned to his neighbourhood in Raqqa. 2018, Raqqa, Syria, Photography from the series “End of the Caliphate”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, Mohammed Haj Ali is busy in the run-up to the Muslim holiday of Eid, cutting the hair of some of the few residents who had returned to his neighbourhood in Raqqa. 2018, Raqqa, Syria, Photography from the series “End of the Caliphate”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett

 

 

Ivor Prickett, Members of a special forces unit of the Bratsvo battalion return after conducting a night-time operation targeting Russian forces behind the front line, along the banks of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. 2022, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Photography from the series “Fighting to Exist”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett
Ivor Prickett, Members of a special forces unit of the Bratsvo battalion return after conducting a night-time operation targeting Russian forces behind the front line, along the banks of the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. 2022, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, Photography from the series “Fighting to Exist”, Courtesy and © Ivor Prickett