Saint-Julien Church, with its baroque interior, is hosting one of the not-to-be-missed exhibitions of the Rencontres d’Arles Off festival. The first exhibition by photojournalist Adrien Vautier, “If You Make It Through the Winter,” is the fruit of four years spent documenting the war in Ukraine for the newspaper Le Monde. Fifty images, harsh and necessary, of a suffering people who refuse to bow.

From Syria to Palestine, by way of Afghanistan and Nagorno-Karabakh, you’ve covered many war zones. What makes Ukraine singular, in your eyes?

Adrien Vautier: Ukraine doesn’t necessarily have anything more singular than the other countries I’ve covered before. Even though every territory is unique. The crimes committed during wars, though, are the same everywhere.

You co-founded Nuit Noire, a publishing house devoted to auteur photography, set apart from the urgency of newsrooms. This work on Ukraine, however, remains anchored in the news of an ongoing war. Why this need for two such different timeframes?

The two coexist independently. When I’m a photojournalist for Le Monde, I set the rest aside, and vice versa. It’s important to keep certain things in their place, both when I’m in Ukraine and when I come home.

© Adrien Vautier

How long did it take to mount this exhibition, and what human and material resources did it require?

I put this exhibition together independently. From the start, I asked the set designer Ariane Kovalevsky to join me on the project. An acquaintance had previously suggested that the Arles parish offers churches and parish halls to photographers, and that they select applications according to the subject proposed.

I invested part of my own savings and received help from both my parents at the outset. With that initial budget, I went to see my partners: Amnesty, the Prix Bayeux Calvados, Reporters Without Borders, to complete the budget I needed. The Dahinden lab stood by me from the very start too, and I thank them for it.

As for putting the exhibition together, it was friends who work as carpenters who found wood at a good price and agreed to work for a reduced budget. Several friends, along with Ariane, helped me hang the show. My partner Rachel is handling cultural outreach, together with Émile Lecompte, a student at the ENSP Arles. It’s been real teamwork, real cooperation.

Never give in to gratuitous butchery, never look away either: between these two red lines lies a ridgeline. How do you walk it?

It’s a complex balance that took time to achieve. You have to edit your images a great deal, and test your photographic narrative on the people around you, to arrive at editorial precision. It matters to me to convey the testimony of Ukrainians exactly as they live it.

You’re exhibiting these images beneath the gilding of a baroque altarpiece. What does that represent for you?

I see in it an important symbolism for Ukrainians, who are a deeply devout people, and a direct link between this place and their culture.

© Adrien Vautier

There is, in the exhibition, that photograph of Igor Doroshenko bent over the body of his son Ilya, surely one of the most devastating images in the show. What happened that day, and what is it, in the very composition of the image, that gives it such intensity, in your view?

That day, a Russian strike on a residential area came in the early evening. A ballistic missile carrying submunitions struck the heart of a building, leaving many dead and wounded. Ilya, tragically, had his throat cut open by a submunition.

When I arrived at the strike site, I already knew two children had lost their lives, and I quickly came upon Igor, weeping over his son’s lifeless body. All around him, many people were losing control of their bodies and their minds, overwhelmed by the pain.

It was one of the hardest scenes I’ve had to cover in this conflict. In my view, it’s the closeness in the photograph that gives it this intensity.

And beyond that, I hold myself to a strict standard: the people I photograph must remain dignified in the way I represent them.

Your work also holds on to scenes of waiting, less spectacular, but they speak to the long duration of this war: artillerymen holed up in their cellar, a mother alone in her house. Did the exhibition’s title, that translates in “If You Make It Through the Winter,” grow out of that kind of time: a winter that stretches on and seems as though it will never end?

Yes, absolutely. The title “If You Make It Through the Winter” captures perfectly, I think, the ordeal Ukrainians have been living through since February 2022. Winter, especially in Ukraine, is a harsh season. And this war is like an endless winter, because it drags on and on.

© Adrien Vautier

At the start of the conflict, you could stand within a hundred meters of Russian positions. Today, a “kill zone” stretching nearly fifty kilometers keeps journalists at a distance. Is this exhibition also, without your having set out to make it so, the story of a front line that has become inaccessible to photojournalists?

Indeed, drones have completely changed the front, and with it, the work of journalists in the field. I didn’t necessarily set out to show that in this exhibition, because the front is still accessible. Every journalist is free to go there or not.

But the closest lines are now difficult to reach, even for soldiers, who can find themselves stuck on the front for close to a year, unable to get out.

You’ve warned that media attention thins out as a war settles into the long term. Why is it essential that Ukraine find its place here, at the Rencontres d’Arles?

It seems essential to me to carry the testimony of Ukrainians wherever it’s possible to do so. We tend to file this or that type of photography into categories, and end up confining war photography to only a handful of festivals.

But the testimony of Ukrainians, or of any people who are victims of an invader, should be accessible to everyone. Today, the world of culture must also take on the task of sharing this kind of story: that’s where real commitment lies.

In summer, Arles becomes the center of the photography world — there is no better place to carry this kind of testimony.

Anything you’d like to add?

I want to thank the Ukrainian people for the welcome they give to international journalists. And the whole team who stood by me on this exhibition: Ariane Kovalevsky, Rachel Arditi, Yann Couderc, Frédéric Jouvenel, Guillaume Guilpart, Lisa Millot, the Limo agency.

And also the donors: Catherine Boucherle, Patrick Vautier, and Boris Mabillard. This exhibition would never have existed without the help of my partners: Amnesty International, the Prix Bayeux Calvados, the Dahinden lab, and Reporters Without Borders.

I want to thank, in particular, Le Monde, the newspaper that supports my work and lets me document this over the long term, by continuing to commission my photographs.

The exhibition “Si tu traverses l’hiver” (“If You Make It Through the Winter”) by Adrien Vautier is on view at Saint-Julien Church, 34 rue du 4 septembre, as part of the Off program of the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, through July 26, 2026. Free admission. Open daily, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Instagram: @a.vtierArtist’s website: www.adrienvautier.com

Adrien Vautier’s War in Ukraine: “An Endless Winter”