When the Camera Saw Us Cry
As I wiped away another tear, I realised the camera was watching me. My first thought was I could use it. But then I realised it had robbed me of something real.
As journalists, one of the first lessons we’re taught is not to become the story. For the most part, it’s normally a warning against doing something that might implicate you - like staging an object in a shoot, or making up quotes. In visual media, especially when you’re on camera, it also means you shouldn’t make yourself the centre of attention when you’re trying to focus on someone else.
I had this ethical debate with myself Friday last week, as we watched Ukrainian families waiting for the first of three tranches of prisoners of war (POWs), exchanged with Russia, to arrive back home.
It wasn’t the first time that had been the location for such exchanges. There were a lot of us. I couldn’t see many faces I recognised, and it reminded me that even I - someone considered experienced in Ukraine by my colleagues - was new here; a visitor as a journalist, let alone as a human being. When you watch other journalists, you have this nagging thought that they know more than you. A better source. A better perspective. A stronger relationship with the people - and with the story itself. Maybe a better relationship with themselves. It’s one of those things you think might never go away.
I saw a couple laughing at one point, light-heartedly, as we waited. I knew it was vital to be able to do so, and that even stories like the war in Ukraine cannot endure - cannot mean something - without moments of lightness. I do that myself, reflexively sometimes. Other times I do it deliberately - wondering if the act of smiling or laughing itself is more meaningful than the subject or sincerity of it. I have wondered if other people too have thought of me like that - like during my first day in Ukraine in 2024, when I laughed at a mistake during filming, insensitively, in the main cemetery in Lviv; contributing further to that impression of journalism’s presence being detached from the experience of its subjects. Back then, it was naivety and disconnection. Now, it was part of the performance.
We stood among the families and loved ones of Ukrainian soldiers MIA - almost exclusively women and children. I thought about how normal it is for war. I thought then about recording something on camera, as another reporter was about to. Then I thought better of it. This wasn’t the time - before the POWs arrived - that would last. This was the before. It felt newsworthy because it was, but not in that context. Not in the 12 hours or so from now when everything would be shaped by their arrival.
We began to talk to the families - some translated in real time, some not until afterwards.
First we talked to the mother and wife of Petro. They held a Ukrainian flag with his face printed on it, as so many here do. When I see them, I often wonder about the culture behind it, and why it is not a thing elsewhere as it is here. Petro’s picture had him carrying a wry smile - almost cheeky - like a teenager about to do something mischievous. It jarred against his uniform and his haircut.
The I met Anastasia.
I asked her about the man she held in her hands. She knew when he’d disappeared. October 6, 2024. Near Vuhledar, in Donetsk. The first few days his colleagues thought he was dead, but when they recovered the bodies from the battlefield, he was not among them. One of his comrades later confessed when he’d left him, he was wounded, but alive. She had hope, she said, that he was in captivity. “I spend five minutes hoping, five minutes crying. It's very hard. And it's hard when my son asks me questions and I don't know what to tell him.”
Anastasia holds a picture of her husband, Oleksandr, waiting to see whether he will be among the prisoners exchanged with Russia
I asked her what she would say if he arrived that day. “That I love him.”
The translations came afterwards, so I didn’t know what she was saying as we talked. All I could understand was her body language, her expressions and her emotion.
She cried again as she finished talking.
Sometimes we ask questions in interviews not for the soundbites, but to ground the rapport in something real. I had told her how handsome Oleksandr looked in his photo and how shocked I was at his age because he looked so young. I told the others we spoke to that day exactly the same thing. Anastasia had beamed with pride. I don’t know whether I would have done the same outside of the interview or not, but I do know I meant it when I said it to her. I meant the feeling, even if the sentiment was reused.
I remember feeling exhausted and performative by the time we approached the third family, and I think I got the impression they did too. I think there’s an unspoken understanding of being a family of POWs, when you know that attention of the sort I can provide - even a little - may just make the difference. But the chance to talk about the people you miss is also a way of keeping them alive and making them feel close again.
When I read back the translation of our talk with Anastasia, it turned out she had understood that. “It's okay if this somehow helps to find him,” she’d said, after she started crying on camera with us. “I'm crying anyway.”
I thought about the performance of it all. The journalists. The families. The exchange itself - choreographed by an increasingly efficient and experienced public relations industry, and a government that understands the importance of message in this war.
But as I looked around, I thought too about the stories. I looked at the flags and the pictures, and started counting them. I don’t think I got past 20 before I started to look past the first few families to my right, and then looked up and down the hundreds of people there. I looked at the children, the young ones - some of the playing. I thought about my own kids. It began to overwhelm me.
As the tears pricked my eyes, I kept looking around, swimming in it all - in the scale of everything we were standing among. Then I noticed in the corner of my eye, slightly blurred now, my cameraman raising the lens in my direction. I knew he was filming me. The emotion started to fade almost immediately, as I realised what was happening. I began to think about how I could use that in my report - whether to use it, and break one of the rules I was taught. As I did, and I felt the moment slip away though, I became aware of my sudden detachment, and the feeling that had made me cry ebb. I was no longer in it. By filming it, suddenly the thing that had made me feel was no longer real. The camera had taken it from me. I wasn’t just a person any longer, consumed by the struggle of the people consumed by this war. I was a performer, cynical and manipulative.
I didn’t stop the filming. I stood there, and waited. I thought again about my kids, and why I had left them. Why I keep leaving them to come to places like this.
I went to sit down, on the dry bald grass by the verge, among the families. For a moment, I felt almost like a family member - but I was on the opposite side. I was the one with people back home looking at pictures of me, wondering where I was and whether I was safe. People frame POWs as victims because they are, but there is a guilt among some - and I’ve heard it - that they put themselves in positions for that to happen in the first place. That’s why one of the first things you hear when they come back is “I’m sorry.” I thought about all the apologies I have already made to my children for being away, and all the ones I would make. I thought about the ones I’m making now, writing this, and imagining my daughters reading it.
I kept moving though, and thinking about how to tell the story. How to do justice to the story in a way that felt real.
I bristled at various points at the reactions of the others, even as I reacted in the same way, or a way that wouldn’t have appeared any different to them. My cameraman was singleminded and driven by the purpose of following a character through a crowd, and - as most cameramen are - simply getting the sound right and getting the shot. My fixer for different reasons - sympathetic yes but also with a tone jaded by more than three years of war. I too then fell into both those modes, and began performing again, as I needed to.
After seven hours of waiting, the POWs arrived on buses. Oleksandr, Anastasia’s husband, was not among them.
There seemed a solidarity and sympathy among those people that were experiencing the same thing. But there also competition. Jostling. Screams over one another, as each asked the POWs that had been returned if they knew anything of the ones that didn’t. The families needed news. They needed to be seen. They believe they deserve their loved ones home than anyone else. Can you look at each of those people though and say one of them is more deserving than another? I couldn’t. Even the small children, holding pictures of daddies and uncles and grandpas. There shouldn’t be a need to say one pain is worse than another.
It was hard leaving that place. I felt guilty about doing so. I wanted to look back but didn’t dare. I worried that if I did, I might not be able to leave. I knew that the families would never really leave - even the few that had had happy endings. That location - that hospital in Chernihiv - was now forever a part of their story.
I felt guilty too about leaving Anastasia in the middle of her story. I wondered whether she had felt used. That was why I touched her on the shoulder at the end of our last chat, and kept looking her in the eye as we all finished talking and silence settled between us - almost like I was apologising; for her pain, and for using it.
I needed to feel human in that moment and I wanted her to see that, in the same way I was aware of other families earlier in the day witnessing my tears. I wanted them to see how different and important that audience was for me, at the moment there in Chernihiv - not just the audience on the other side of the camera.
I wondered where Anastasia drew her strength from. What makes her believe he will come back? It is not just denial - you can see it in their eyes. It felt like defiance, as I later said in my script. A different form of bravery.
Watching my report back I feel this horrible sense of injustice to Anastasia’s story. Moments can’t capture everything. We can only try and walk through the shoes of others for a snapshot - even just a few minutes. Perhaps writing this is my way of giving more of myself to her than I could before - of saying that I had seen her, and I wanted others to as well.
