By Gregory Crofton
Pierre Crom is a French photographer who seems to like being in control of things. He sips his coffee carefully and speaks deliberately when interviewed about his work.
But war photography, a field he chose once he decided to leave behind the more propagandistic daily news cycle, brings with it a heavy dose of chaos and death. Part of Crom’s immediate challenge in transitioning to this new world was to figure out a way to maintain the methods he relied on to produce good work and still go home and sleep at night.
“There is nothing that can protect you from what you see, what you smell, what you hear, or what you experience,” Crom says. “You just take it in your face, you carry it with you.”
“Signs of War” explores still photos Crom shot starting with the Russian invasion of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. Director Juri Rechinsky adds pockets of video, but the doc is mainly Crom’s work produced over a stretch of years strung into an artful “photo documentary.”
Giving viewers enough screen time to analyze each piece of Crom’s work amplifies the power of his photos. This focus helps the film succeed in showing how Ukrainians might have felt as their lives marched into a full-blown regional war with Russia in 2022.
One of the first violent events Crom covered was the destruction of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17. The packed plane took off in Amsterdam and got shot down with a Russian-manned rocket launcher over Eastern Ukraine. The attack killed all 298 people on board and it was Crom’s job to photograph burned bodies, severed legs, fields of twisted metal and pieces of luggage that no longer had an owner.
“I started to be very practical in order to push back emotions,” he says. “It was mix of negative emotions … fear …. but then you realize, ‘I’m here and I’m here to witness and to find out what happened.’ And then everything kind of goes into a flow.”
The day after Crom photographed the horrific scene, the impact of what he had witnessed began to sink in. He’d lived in the Netherlands for decades, and the rocket killed 200 Dutch people along with 80 children.
This is what it meant for Crom to leave staged photos behind. This is what it meant to witness war, do important work, and become a purveyor of dark art.
“Signs of War” (2022) is streaming on True Story. Trailer below.