War does not end with silence. When the explosions cease, their echoes persist—not just in memory, but in matter. The land absorbs it.
It becomes saturated with absence, haunted by what has passed through. In Radiations of War, Yana Kononova does not offer a document; she offers a confrontation—with a terrain where the disaster is not over, only altered. Here, the earth becomes both witness and wound, archive and elegy.
What remains when the front line withdraws is not just wreckage, but transformation. Ruins are not inert—they breathe, shift, resist closure. The landscapes in Kononova’s images are charged, not just with destruction, but with the psychic residue of war’s continuation. These are not photographs as records; they are traces of trauma embedded in stone, in steel, in soil.
The word radiation holds multiple truths. It evokes toxicity—chemical, emotional, historical. It conjures an invisible tremor that ripples outward: across geography, through generations, into the body’s own memory. It speaks to a war that is no longer seen, but still felt—a war that does not leave, but lingers.
For Kononova, this is not an aftermath. This is the event itself, continuing by other means. She began this work in March 2022, moving through the margins of catastrophe: towns ravaged by shelling, sites of occupation, landscapes scorched by rocket fire. Her medium-format camera captures what remains—twisted rebar, scorched buildings, emergency workers in their quiet labors, the bodies of soldiers and civilians who did not survive.
As I move through the book, I am confronted by wreckage so profound it becomes sublime. Bent steel, ruptured concrete, human forms caught mid-gesture—these are not just remnants, they are testaments. And still, I catch myself. There is beauty here, and that troubles me. The mind, seeking coherence, finds a terrible awe. And with it, guilt. How can I hold appreciation and horror in the same breath?
There is a chemical shift in the brain when violence rewires perception. It creates a dissonance, a kind of psychic vertigo—where the world-building of our assumptions collapses. I feel it physically: a pressure at the base of my skull, the edge of a panic I can’t name. I am trapped between bearing witness and wishing to look away.
And then, salvation—or escape. The book closes. I return to my world. But something lingers. That is the radiation too.
