The US photographer’s image of a cyclist on a tank-tracked road in 2022 reflects the resilience of a population under siege
Smith, a New York-born freelance photographer, travelled more than 10,000 miles in Ukraine in 2022, the first year of the Russian invasion. A monograph of his extraordinary pictures, Testament ’22, is published this month. One inspiration for his travels was the journeys in 1844 of the Ukrainian artist and poet Taras Shevchenko, who produced a series of etchings of a long-ago generation of his countrymen – perennially suffering under Russian expansionism – with the aim of buying his family out of serfdom.
