Photographer Cara Anna saw this still life of a breakfast table in a home in the Ukrainian city of Irpin. The family with two children had apparently fled headlong. The father has since returned and found a gang in his house.
The scene is reminiscent of the glorious still lifes of the 17th-century painter Willem Kalf (1619-1693): the soft sunlight falling on the dining table and giving the food a rich, almost golden sheen. The bare gray wall on which the shadow of the bouquet of dried flowers falls is reminiscent of Vermeer: the surface is a visual rest point, which emphasizes the subject in the foreground, while at the same time creating a sense of spaciousness. But just as 17th-century painters reveled in exquisite tropical fruits, fresh shiny fish, grapes and veined meat, AP photographer Cara Anna shows the drama of a flight with this still life from Ukrainian Irpin.
Perhaps there was something to celebrate when the family gathered at the breakfast table. The two now withered plants point to this: they are wrapped like presents, with bows tied around the paper. In the foreground is a bowl with a pizza-like cookie on it, behind it on the right is a bowl with a fruit snack or a smoothie, poured from the plastic jug next to it. In the middle of the table is a bread basket with a box of tissues on top – indispensable when a toddler starts eating. At the front left, under the carton with cornflakes or breakfast cereals, is a child’s drawing, at least a first attempt at it, which the maker undoubtedly filled with pride. Near the wall is a comic sheet on the table with animals in the lead.
The high chair deserves special attention. A plastic dish with presumably cornflakes and a few pieces of that cheesecake, which shows the semi-circularity of a toddler’s mouth that has put its milk teeth in it. Everything indicates that the family has left the breakfast table at lightning speed. The danger came so close that there was not a second to lose. The toddler was lifted out of the chair, father and mother started to run. It is striking that in the panic the spoon that the toddler always drops on the floor, has still remained on the edge of the bowl. Which is also possible: the toddler did not eat himself, but the parent who fed the child, reflexively put the spoon on the edge.
Residents return
The breakfast table has been left untouched for weeks after the family with two children, ages 2 and 4, fled headlong in the ravaged Irpin suburb of Kyiv. In the meantime, the Russian troops have withdrawn from the wider area of Irpin, and the inhabitants are slowly returning to the damage from the violence of war to take in their city.
Last Monday, the father, 34-year-old Oleksi Planida, returned to the apartment in the flat for the first time. When the photographer visited, he was in the process of temporarily replacing large shattered windows with plastic sheeting ‘to keep out the rain’. Planida told Anna that Russian soldiers ransacked the entire apartment – it’s a huge mess – and stole a laptop, an iPad and jewelry. He thinks it will take years to repair the damage to the house. In veiled terms, he and his wife try to tell the children that “bad guys” have come: “I hope they never see their home as it is now.”
The photographer does not mention whether Planida was able to get rid of the decay, wilting and mold that surrounds the breakfast table. Those who now stay in Irpin are used to the stench of decomposition and probably don’t turn their backs on some rotting leftovers. At the same time, those remnants on the table are the very last visible and tangible memories of an everyday, carefree family life. Happiness fossilized in decay that never comes back. And the father knows that.