Inconvenient Place

"Inconvenient Place" is a joint project by journalist Jonathan Littell and photographer Antoine d'Agata about Babyn Yar, historical memory, and the war crimes of Russia in Ukraine in the 2000s. The manuscript of the book was completed two days before Russia's attack on Ukraine. In November 2022, Littell returned to the text to rewrite it in accordance with the new reality, in which Bucha had already occurred, the occupation of Mariupol took place, and new crimes committed by the Russian military in Ukraine are revealed every day. A few months before the start of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Jonathan Littell and Antoine d'Agata went to Kyiv, to Babyn Yar - a place where, in the early 1940s, the Nazis shot about 60,000 Jews and another 40,000 people of other nationalities. Littell and d'Agata tried to understand how it happened that the memory of this tragedy became, in its own way, inconvenient for the residents of the areas that grew up on the site of the filled-in ravines of Babyn Yar, and for Ukrainians as a nation in general. Littell spoke with dozens of people who experienced the German occupation in the early 1940s and the Russian occupation in 2022, as well as historians, priests, volunteers - and even with one former neo-Nazi. d'Agata photographed their portraits and documented what Babyn Yar and other areas near Kyiv look like today after the retreat of the Russian army.