From humanitarian mission to the front line, Ashland photographer documents the war in Ukraine

In March, Ashland photographer Christopher Briscoe traveled with doctors on a humanitarian mission to Poland to help refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. Ten days later, when the mission ended and the doctors departed, Briscoe decided to cross the border into Ukraine. With the help of an interpreter, Briscoe has been capturing portraits of people and stories of loss and resilience amid the sound of air raid sirens and bombardment by Russian artillery. He joins us from Lviv, Ukraine to talk about what he’s been seeing and why he feels his professional journey has led him to this moment.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: We start today with Christopher Briscoe; he is a renowned photographer normally based in Ashland, OR. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February, Briscoe went to the border between Ukraine and Poland to document the humanitarian work of a team of 25 medical professionals from all around the world. The doctors left after about 10 days, but Briscoe stayed. He realized there were more stories to tell and more images that he needed to share with the world. Christopher Briscoe joins us now from Lviv, Ukraine. Welcome to Think Out Loud.

Christopher Briscoe: Oh, I’m happy to be here. Thank you.

Miller: How did your trip to the Ukrainian border initially come together?

Briscoe: Well, during the last few years, I’ve been working with a great cataract surgeon from Ashland named Matt Oliver. He and I went to Africa with several other doctors on his team. They hired me to do a book for them, and one of those doctors lives in Portugal. He called me a few months ago and said “Hey, I’m going with another group of docs to the border of Ukraine. Do you want to come?” And it took me about two seconds to say “Absolutely.”

Miller: Why? Why was it an immediate yes for you?

Briscoe: All of these other projects I’ve been working on in Africa, and before that in India, and before that in Cambodia, it seems like all of them have led up, in my career anyway, to this epic event that is one of the most important events since World War II. I just could not turn this down. When they all said they were going home, I could not get on the plane. There were too many stories I’ve been doing, and many of them were heartbreaking, and many of them were inspiring. I was not going to leave that behind.

Miller: Before we get to that decision, that almost seems like it wasn’t even a decision. It was just a gut feeling that you weren’t going to leave.

Briscoe: Yes.

Miller: I’m curious about the first week and a half. What do you remember about your arrival at that border zone? This was early on in the war, when I wrote that there were still refugees who were streaming across the border.

Briscoe: Yes, thousands a day, mid March. A lot of the time it was cold. A lot of the time it was rainy. I would go to the border itself and watch these people come across, carrying their kids and their pets. Then they would go through this gauntlet of all different kinds of volunteers wanting to help them with food, with suitcases, with transportation. Many of them would go to this huge refugee center called Tesco, which is kind of like an abandoned mall, and instead of the beauty salon, now that was the Red Cross tent in there. You’d walk into this huge open room that had maybe two to three hundred cots, all occupied by refugees waiting to get on a bus, to have someone tell them where they could go.

I was with this group of doctors who had never been there before, and frankly, during the first few days we were all kind of … not freaked out, but alarmed. One of the leaders got up and said, “Look, you’ve got to have your passport with you at all times. There are bounties on American’s heads for $10,000. Anyone who goes across the border, just for a minute, will be thrown out of the group.”

So, we didn’t know what we were getting into and after, like I said, a week or 10 days, they all had to go back to their families, to their practices. I had an interpreter there who had hooked me up with some amazing stories to do or people that had escaped, some of them literally in a hail of bullets. I was not going to leave that behind.

Miller: Did you have a return ticket?

Briscoe: Yes, yep. I notified the United Airlines and talked to them. I said “Sorry, I’m not getting on the plane.”

Miller: Where did you go first? And then, immediately, you crossed that border that you had been told that you couldn’t?

Briscoe: Yes! Yes. As soon as they left, man, I was across the border, and it’s really interesting. I tell people all the time on my Facebook posts, I say two things. One, if you want your soul cracked open, go to Ukraine. The other thing I say constantly is that the comfort zone is way overrated. You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone. That’s what I’ve always strived to do, and that’s what I did when I stepped across the border.  I went to Lviv, and then after that I went all the way up to Kiev, and then I went all the way up to Bucha, and then came back down to Lviv. Then I went all the way up to the eastern front.

Miller: Can you tell us the story of a surgeon you met named Serhii Danylkiv?

Briscoe: Yes, he is the brother of one of the docs that was on the team. The doctor is a wonderful woman who’s a cataract surgeon, who happened to live in Minnesota. She grew up in Ukraine, so her brother lived up in Busca and he, over breakfast, told me this story that had me crying within five minutes. The rockets are falling, his town has been overrun, he and his family are in their root cellar, their basement. Other families in the neighborhood join, and then they sneak out at night to the family well to get some water. He has two twins, six year old daughters, and a teenage boy who’s about to turn 16 or 17. They want to have a birthday party for him and they can’t even have a cake, so the twins get out their pieces of paper and draw a birthday cake for him. On the eve of his birthday, the father and son sneak out and go to the local blood donor bank and donate blood.

After X number of days, it’s getting worse, and they said “Look, a little window is here to escape, and I think we ought to take advantage of it.” So he puts his family in this car. In the back seat there are two big jerry cans filled with the necessary fuel to make it to the border, and he has to make the decision to put the twin daughters in between these jerry cans full of fuel.

As they’re driving out of town, a couple of cars ahead of them are just riddled with bullets. He’s swerving around them. He’s looking at the blood, he’s thinking of different routes to get to, once he gets past that, and how he can get on some back roads, some dirt roads, to finally make it to Lviv and then the border. Being a parent myself, just the thought of having your twin daughters, six years old, in the backseat in a hail of bullets, you just can’t even comprehend it.

I did another story on a woman who lived near the eastern front. She had a very successful business; she was a pilates instructor, and just like anyone in Ashland or Southern Oregon or Portland. She was 32, beautiful, and she had a really cool, coffeehouse life with her friends. Then, all of a sudden the Russians started getting closer and the bombs started falling, and the missiles.

She went to her friend’s house, because her friend had thicker walls. Her friend was in the shower one day, washing her hair, and this woman, Anastacia, looks out the window and she sees a Russian tank sitting in front of the house so she’s banging on the bathroom door, “Hey, you better get out, cut the shower a little short here, because we’ve got a Russian tank out front.”

During the next couple of days, they pile everything they can into their car. She didn’t know it, but her dad was just a few miles away at the same time also, working in a blood bank. He was on the top floor and a missile hit nearby, shattering all the windows. His staff was all in the basement, but he stayed on the top floor with his patient who was hooked up to an IV, giving some blood. So, when the window shattered, his patient dropped dead right there, boom, of a heart attack and sadly, what Anastacia didn’t realize was that, a few minutes later, her father dropped dead of a heart attack, too.

Anastacia and her friend get in the car, and they get the fuel together, the food together, and they’re going to make a run for the border which took a few days, and along the way her mother is texting her, ‘look, when you get to the border, Anastacia, promise me that you will take a picture of the Polish stamp on your passport so I will know that you are safe.’ So she gets to the border, finally, and she gets the passport stamped. She takes a picture and texts it to her mom, and then her mom texts back ‘I have some very sad news to tell you about your father.’

Those kind of stories, they’re just endless here. The other day, I went to a funeral, not for one soldier, but for three, and went through the funeral, and the family walks past the casket, touching it, crying, leaning on the casket. Then I go to the cemetery with the families, and the same thing is happening. The gravediggers are digging the grave, and they lower the caskets carefully into the ground two meters deep. The cross is put in and the daughter is leaning on the cross crying, leaning into her mother who is crying, leaning into the son who is crying, leaning into the grandmother who is crying.

It’s just so profound here, every day. I cannot leave these stories behind, especially when America gets so distracted by who slapped who at the Oscars, and then a couple weeks later Johnny Depp got slapped by his wife and everyone’s talking about that. We’re here at the epicenter of the most important event probably since World War II, which is happening in Ukraine.

Miller: On that last note, you’re talking about how American interest, and perhaps Western or global interest more broadly, has waned since the wall-to-wall coverage in February and March. Do people you talk to, do Ukrainians you talk to, do they mention that they’re noticing the reduction in interest as well?

Briscoe: Yes. To their defense, Americans, people in general, have compassion fatigue. People can only look at these kinds of stories, these kinds of pictures, so much until they click onto something that’s going to give them a little rest, and maybe Johnny Depp gave them that. But I’ll never forget when I was with a bunch of military people on the border inside Ukraine, in a really interesting camp that was among abandoned warehouses, so it was disguised from the air really well. I’ll never forget, I walked up to a soldier who spoke some English, and I said proudly “I want you to know that the whole world is behind you.” I’m standing there, patting him on the back, like I brought him some gift, and he looks at me and he shrugs. He says, “Yeah, where are they?”

Miller: I saw that. I should note that that photograph and that story, and many ones you’ve taken are on your Facebook page. We’ll put a link to that, so people listening now can see the photos and read some of the stories behind them.

In that moment, you’re not the U.S. Government. You’re not the entire population of the U.S. or the rest of the world. You’re just one person taking photographs. I’m curious what your goal is, and what you think you can actually accomplish.

Briscoe: Well my goal, since I have so many stories and so many people on Facebook say “you’ve got to do a book.” So that’s one of the goals. The other goal that I tell people, I say, if you want your soul cracked open, come to Ukraine. These people that I’ve met, the stories that I’ve heard, the firsthand experiences I’ve had, being on the eastern front last week, wearing a bulletproof vest and a helmet being invited into a hobble with some soldiers who cooked me dinner … It has changed me. It has moved my soul to a new place, and that’s what I would think all of us want. I know that I’ve always pushed for that.

Miller: You wrote back in March: “People from around the world have traveled to the Polish-Ukraine border, wanting to help. They’re average men and women, willing to play a small but meaningful role in this world stage of pain and sorrow. They come for various reasons. Some come to heal, others come to be healed.” That last part is what I’m interested in because, and I think you said that, it can also feel selfish. I mean, you’ve used the phrase if you want your soul to be cracked open, come here. Did you seek healing when you went yourself?

Briscoe: I didn’t see it as that, at all. The very first story I did was at a distribution center, just over the border in Poland, and I met this guy from Wales. His name was David Leeke and he was a cook. He was cooking in Wales and he was watching the news like everyone else, and he just felt compelled and he asked for some time off from his boss. He jumped in his car, drove all over there, and then I found him, working fifteen to seventeen hours a day, cooking for all these people at the distribution center. I asked him, “Sir, David, when you go back home and this is all over for you, what’s the one thing, the one takeaway, that you’re going to have?” He looked at me without even thinking and he said, very sincerely, “That I am a good person.” I walked away from that first interview and thought, wow.

Then, some of the docs that I was with, they didn’t have any experience being there and they were all there for different reasons. Then I met a retired attorney, a guy named Bill Sharp from Eugene. He was working for our world Central Kitchens in this big tent next to the border, and he was a retired attorney. He had been an attorney for 43 years, watching tv like everyone else. Stood up, ‘I gotta do something.’ He went looking for places to volunteer, and World Central Kitchen had like a few spots open, and he got on the plane, and he was there. Here’s a guy that had this profession for 43 years and just said ‘I wanted to do something meaningful.’ Now that’s not to say that the work he did before wasn’t meaningful, but he wanted to do something meaningful with this part of his life.

In my work, that’s what people ask me all the time. ‘Chris, do you photograph landscapes?’ And I say, no, the most interesting landscape to me is the human face, and more recently when I’ve been doing books, in the last five years, it’s a human story. Everybody has a story, and I’m just thrilled to know people’s stories. Then you come here and wow, the stories will make you cry in a minute.

Miller: There’s obviously, as you noted, a lot of grieving and pain in your photos. I imagine it’s hard not to capture that these days. Have you also sought out moments of joy there?

Briscoe: Yes, one time I was in the middle of Ukraine and I ended up in a friend-of-a-friend kind of thing, and I went to his ranch. He had this beautiful ranch, and he had these horses that he loved to train. He referred to himself as a ‘horse whisperer’. I really got into watching him, how he trains the horses, and then we would go for these rides through these thick forests. In that part of Ukraine it’s, apparently, one of the best pieces of fertile earth on the planet. I played with the baby goats. The last day he said, “See that river? It’s about 15 kilometers away. If the Russians cross that river, the first thing they’re going to do is they’re going to shoot my horses, then they’re going to shoot me, then they’re going to rape my wife.” He looks at me. “Not one of them, but five of them. So my future here, Chris, is very tenuous.” So the first part of that story was it was just a beautiful place, and watching him work with the animals.

Then the other day, I did a happy story on a doggy named Patron. I went to this open field, it was like a big soccer field. Last week, it was National Children’s Day, and this doggy, with his handler, was on stage. This doggy is famous, like rock star famous, around Ukraine and parts of the world for having sniffed out more than 200 undetonated landmines. To see people, and especially these kids, clamor around this dog like he’s from the most famous rock band in the world, and do anything to get a selfie with this dog was really fantastic.

I frankly felt really sorry at the end of the day for the dog, but this dog has inspired a lot of people. He has several thousand followers on Instagram. I did a little research on the followers, and one of them is called ‘Patron’s Bride’! [laughs]

Miller: I’m sure he cares a lot about all the followers on Instagram. [laughs] How are you going to know that it’s time to go home, that you’ve cracked your soul open enough?

Briscoe: The problem and the challenge I have right now is that they are only going to let people that aren’t Ukrainians stay 90 days at a time. Worst case scenario, I’m going to have to go home for 90 days and then come right back, and I will be right back. I’m working on getting a special visa that will let me stay indefinitely, and then I’m just gonna have to play it by ear. I have to pace myself, because your soul is cracked open alright, but it takes a toll on your soul, and it’s little things that you hear, the stories firsthand of escaping, the gunfire.

I did another heartbreaking story in this couple’s apartment. This old apartment house, you would feel like you’re in the middle of the Soviet Union. I’m sitting there in a small living room. They’re talking about their son who was killed about a week and a half ago in Mariupol. I looked in the corner of the room and there, wilting, was a bouquet of flowers with wrapping that said Happy Mother’s Day. I asked about it, and this mother, crying, talked about how her son had texted her from the steel mill ‘Happy Mother’s Day’, and how much he loved her, and then he had sent this bouquet of flowers. She found out the next day after that text that he had been killed. Sadly, the bouquet of flowers arrived three days after she found out that her son had died.

It all wears away on you. To answer your question, when will I know to go home? I cannot answer that. I don’t know.

Miller: Christopher Briscoe, thanks for giving us some of your time today. I really appreciate it.

Briscoe: I appreciate your thoughtful questions.

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