Kostiantyn Liberov

The contemporary war in Ukraine has transformed not only the tactics of warfare but also the very principle of visibility. Light, which historically has been a fundamental condition of photography, has become a threat. Any source of light — a phone screen, a lighter, the reflection of a surface — can mean detection and death. Visibility is no longer neutral; it has become a risk.

Under these conditions, war almost entirely shifts into darkness. Night is no longer an exception but an operational norm. Space is controlled not by human eyes but by machines: drones, thermal imagers, and infrared sensors. They shape a new reality in which humans must exist in ways that prevent them from being seen.

The project “The War That Cannot Be Seen” is an attempt to record this reality in which traditional photography loses the possibility of direct testimony. The series was created using infrared digital photography, allowing work with light spectra invisible to the human eye. A camera modified to register infrared radiation captures not events themselves but traces of presence: the movement of a body in complete darkness, the warmth of human contact, fragments of interaction in places where visible light cannot exist.

The photographs were taken during a single 24-hour period in summer, during the night rotation of a unit of the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade. Entry to the positions took place at night without the use of any artificial lighting. Most of the shooting occurred underground or in conditions of complete darkness, as remaining on the surface was extremely dangerous. The space existed as a closed system of silence, anticipation, and tension, where every movement had to remain invisible.

This project is not a report about combat. It documents a condition. The limitation of the frame to one day and one military unit is a deliberate artistic decision that transforms the series into an element of collective memory rather than a chronological narrative. It is a fragment of experience that might otherwise have been lost but survives as images.

Visibility in these works is determined not by the author’s decision but by the level of threat. Faces appear only where darkness allows it. In other cases they dissolve into noise, blur, or disappear entirely. Identity becomes unstable, movement replaces narrative, and presence exists without a clear form.

The project addresses a paradox of contemporary war: it is totally observed by machines yet becomes increasingly invisible to humans. In this context, infrared images function as a metaphor for memory that forms not for archiving but for survival. It is an archive created not to preserve, but to conceal.

Within the project, light ceases to perform its traditional function of revelation. It no longer helps us see the war but instead testifies to its impossibility of being seen. Photography here becomes not an instrument of explanation but a way to record the boundary between presence and disappearance.

The project raises questions about the limits of the visual archive in wartime: how to document an experience that deliberately avoids visibility, and what remains in collective memory when light is no longer able to fulfill its function of vision.