Byron Smith’s Testament ’22 began with a long road: roughly ten thousand miles across Ukraine during the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion. Working as a freelance photojournalist, Smith moved from the devastated suburbs of Kyiv to villages newly returned to Ukrainian control, making photographs that hold grief and endurance in the same frame. The book’s title invokes Taras Shevchenko, and that literary echo suggests the register Smith is after — witness rather than spectacle, a record meant to outlast the moment that produced it.

Black-and-white and colour photographs bring different registers of looking into the same account. The publisher identifies grieving mothers, damaged communities and newly liberated settlements among its subjects; the gallery also shows quieter intervals and ordinary objects within the damaged environment. These shifts matter because the human consequences of war continue outside the instant of violence. The photographs connect the visible destruction of buildings with lives that must still be lived around them, asking the reader to attend to duration as well as events.

The 192-page hardcover, measuring 18 by 24.4 centimetres, keeps this extended journey within a relatively intimate format. Igor Kossov, the Kyiv Independent reporter with whom Smith collaborated on frontline dispatches, contributes text. His reporting provides a second means of approaching circumstances that a photograph cannot fully explain. The relationship between written account and image is especially important here: each can locate or complicate the other, without asking a single picture to stand for an entire country.

Published by Verlag Kettler in August 2024, this is Smith’s debut monograph, following a decade of photojournalistic work in New York. It was a finalist in the Traditional category of the 2024 Lucie Photo Book Prize. For collectors of documentary photography, its value lies in the sustained account of the invasion’s first year and the dialogue between photographic witness and frontline reporting. The book gives geographically dispersed encounters a form that can be revisited, preserving the circumstances of individual lives beyond the pace of daily news.