“I came immediately when the war started and ended up right in the middle of mayhem in eastern Ukraine very quickly,” he said.

In recent months, his pictures have been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and other publications. He was among the first to document the mass killings of unarmed civilians in Bucha. In April, he photographed the country’s embattled leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, at the presidential compound in the capital, Kyiv. And in June, he spent time with soldiers near the front line in the Donbas. One of his pictures—of a young woman rescuing dogs from a shelter in Irpin amid Russian attack in the early days of the war—has taken on a life of its own as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance.

It’s the kind of work that Occhicone has wanted to do since he was an undergraduate at Fordham in the early 1990s, when a friend and fellow classmate of Croatian descent showed him magazine stories depicting war in the former Yugoslavia. “I remember the pictures, I remember who took them, and it became a kind of goal of mine” to become a war photographer, Occhicone said by phone from Kyiv in early March.

Another inspiration, he said, was his grandfather, a World War II veteran who lived in the Belmont neighborhood of the Bronx, near Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. “The family dream was always to go to Fordham,” Occhicone said. “That was like success, you know? He came from Italy, and seeing the Fordham guys, [he thought], one day, somebody in our family will go there.” Occhicone’s grandfather died in 2017 at 101.

“He talked about [his war experiences] until maybe his last day, and it was always about the comradeship and the bonding,” Occhicone said. “That’s something I wanted to understand.”

Evacuating Civilians Amid the Battle of Irpin

On Saturday, March 5, as Russian forces surrounded Kyiv on all sides but the south, Occhicone joined a convoy of volunteers who arranged to help evacuate several dozen people hiding in a church basement in Irpin, a city about a dozen miles northwest of Kyiv. To help slow the Russian advance, Ukrainian forces had blown up a bridge over the Irpin River, one of the main routes leading out of the city toward Kyiv.

“We were deep in the city [bringing people out], and in the middle of it, we started getting shelled—small arms fire flying overhead, tanks shooting buildings maybe 200 meters away,” Occhicone said the next day. “We were able to get out, but right in front of us, maybe like a couple of hundred feet, guys blew up a Russian vehicle, a road was closed. It was just chaotic. You don’t know who’s where.”

Occhicone returned to the city to photograph and assist with successive waves of evacuations near the battered bridge.

“I don’t know who said war is hell, but it is hell, and you’ve got to document it,” he said on March 17, describing the fear experienced by civilians leaving homes burned to the ground, carrying a “plastic bag with some shoes” in it.

By the end of March, Irpin was “an abandoned ghost town of ruined buildings,” Reuters reported, but Ukrainian forces had recaptured the city and helped prevent a siege of Kyiv.

In Bucha, Helping a Son Find and Bury His Father

In early April, Occhicone was one of the first photojournalists to arrive in Bucha, about 20 miles northwest of Kyiv, after it was liberated. “When we entered the city, we saw [people] putting the Ukrainian flag up at the city hall,” he said. He also saw and documented graphic evidence of war crimes.

Retreating Russian soldiers had left behind dozens of dead civilians, some with their hands tied—atrocities that prompted U.S. President Joe Biden to describe Russia’s war in Ukraine as genocide. In an auto repair shop in an industrial part of town, Occhicone photographed the body of a man in work clothes with a gunshot wound to his head. He apparently had been executed and left in a well in the garage.

“At the time, I didn’t know who he was. I just assumed he was a mechanic,” Occhicone said, “and my father’s an auto mechanic by trade—he owned a gas station, real estate, and other stuff, but that’s how he started out. So I see this older man executed in what I thought was his place of business, and that’s probably the one that affected me the most.”

About two weeks later, a Bucha city councilwoman contacted Occhicone. She had been collecting pictures of the atrocities from journalists and others in an effort to help residents locate missing family members, she said, and a young man had seen the picture of the man in the garage and recognized the body as his father’s. She asked if Occhicone would like to meet the family at the morgue in Kyiv in the morning.

Although he was in Romania, taking his first brief vacation in many months, he made the 12-hour drive to meet the family. At the morgue, he learned that the man, Myron Zvarychuk, was not a mechanic but a Ukrainian Orthodox priest. He had been associated with St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery in Kyiv, and he was working at a small church in Bucha, where he had been renting a room from an older woman named Kateryna. On the day he disappeared, he had left to get food and water for her.

From the morgue, Occhicone accompanied the family to Father Zvarychuk’s room in Bucha, where they picked up the priest’s vestments. After returning to Kyiv to collect the body, they traveled to his native village, near Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, and Occhicone spent several hours at the family’s home before attending the funeral Mass and burial.

“To be able to meet the family and spend a day with them was really an incredible experience,” Occhicone said. “You normally don’t get to follow up on these things. You’re in a situation where there’s dead bodies all over the place, and it feels very surreal. But to be able to put a name to the man, to know something about him, to meet his family was really a great thing, you know. This guy was a loved person. People loved the village priest.”

Capturing the Spirit of the Resistance

On March 10, while returning to Irpin to document the humanitarian evacuation of the city that was later retaken by Ukrainian forces, Occhicone made what has become his most iconic and widely seen picture of the war.

“In this atmosphere of fear,” he wrote on Instagram that day, “a woman emerges and she is bringing disabled dogs from a shelter to safety.”

He went to sleep after posting the picture, and “the next day, people were like, ‘The president just reposted you.’” He said the image was featured on the country’s official website, and it brought attention to the young woman, Anastasiya Tikha, a veterinary student who runs an animal shelter in Iprin. He allowed the image to be used by a dog food company that sought to raise money for people in Ukraine, he said, and with Tikha’s permission, he provided her bank account information to dozens of people who wanted to send her donations.

“People are making posters and memes of the image,” he said, “and sending me drawings of the photo from all around the world.” For many people, the image has come to symbolize “the cruelty of the Russian war and the dignity of the Ukrainian response,” The Guardian wrote in a May 23 article about Tikha.

“She’s a woman of action, and people love that,” Occhicone said. “And it’s dangerous. This is exactly where [U.S. journalist and filmmaker] Brent Renaud was killed [on March 13], and this girl took all the dogs out of the kennel and just walked them out of town.”

About Christopher Occhicone

After earning a bachelor’s degree in history from Fordham in 1995, Occhicone worked as a teacher in Poland and Italy, and pursued graduate studies in public health at Harvard University and conflict resolution at Seton Hall University. In 2014, he completed the one-year program in documentary practice and visual journalism at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

A cinematographer tells stories with a social conscience

In April, David Quateman filmed a documentary about a psychiatric hospital in Buenos Aires where patients are encouraged to express themselves to the outside world. They take part in a patient-run radio show and paint street art on the walls—“a radically different approach” compared with methods in the U.S., Quateman says.

Quateman loves to connect audiences with realities far different from their own by shooting documentaries. He first pursued this calling at Fordham, where he double-majored in visual arts and communications, and got a break last year when adjunct professor Anibal Pella-Woo invited him to contribute to an exhibit on asylum seekers in New York City.

Helping to make a video for the exhibit, Quateman interviewed several refugees, including a 19-year-old survivor of the Egyptian revolution and a Nigerian man who hadn’t seen his wife and young daughter in three years. “It was amazing having the privilege to watch these people and try and understand what they are going through,” Quateman says.

After graduating, he teamed up with Alexander Fish, a Princeton University student, for a project on mental health treatment methods in South America. They traveled to the hospital in Argentina and to Peru, where they filmed a healer in the Amazon who uses ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic mixture, to help patients transform their thinking. They spent days on a boat in 100-degree heat to get the story.

“I like seeing the worlds people live in that they don’t talk about forthrightly,” Quateman says, “and try to observe and be in those mental spaces and bring them back for other people.”

—Michael Blanding

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

“There’s something bordering on spiritual when all the elements of the world by chance are in synchronicity, and you—and only you at that moment in time—are paying homage to time itself,” he said.

As artist in residence in the Department of Visual Arts and programmer for the Ildiko Butler Gallery, Lipani Gallery, and Hayden Hartnett Project Space, Apicella-Hitchcock wears several hats at Fordham. One is supervision of Documentary Photography Japan, a six-year-old course in which he chaperones six to eight students on a trip to Japan over the winter break.

Apicella-Hitchcock taught at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2005. He said that, like New York, Tokyo is the kind of place where the more you look for things to photograph, the more interesting it becomes. He and fellow visual arts professor Joseph Lawton teach a similar course in Italy in the summer. In both cases, upon return stateside some 3,000 images are edited down to 64, which are then printed and bound in a book.

Both are digital courses. Apicella-Hitchcock said the goal is to appeal to students with digital photography, which has become democratized thanks to the ubiquitousness of cameras on phones.

“But then we take these interested parties and hook them into the more sophisticated photography, which is photographic syntax: putting together sequences of images that build up and create a larger meaning than the individual integers,” he said.

“The meaning in between the photographs is where the poetry of the art form comes out. One can start to create flashbacks or premonitions of what is to come. One can definitely develop subtleties, so it’s not just the bombast of a greatest hits.”

One of the joys of working with a small group of students is witnessing how creative they can be, since they have no pre-conceived notions about the craft, he said.

“I say to students, only you can do what you’re doing at this point in time. Only you have your sensitivities, your history, your cultural background, your gender background, and your age. And since you’re college students, your youthful enthusiasm is an asset. Your fearlessness allows you to barge into situations that you have no businesses being in, had you thought about it. And consequently, you get amazing primary research.”

With the Ildilko Butler gallery, Apicella-Hitchcock works with students who have finished their senior projects, faculty showing off their latest works, and artists whose projects fit the bill for a specific theme. Sometimes it’s as thematically open as landscapes; other times its more specific, like the 2013 collection of art forgeries that was timed around the Fordham/FBI International Conference on Cyber Security.

“I corral artists, I trust them. They make something, and afterwards you find sometimes tenuous but genuine connections between the works, which is an exploration for them and for myself as well, which is why [artists]do it,” he said.

He lists Gary Metz: Quaking Aspen: A Lyric Complaint, which Apicella-Hitchcock curated with Lawton in the winter of 2014, as one of his favorite exhibits. Metz took black and white landscape pictures of Aspen, Colorado, that challenged the prevailing notions of nature as sublime, heroic, and unspoiled. Metz assumed the viewer was intelligent, and could handle a certain amount of ambiguity, Apicella-Hitchcock said.

“Unlike a stereotypical Hollywood film, you don’t see the ending coming from a mile away. It’s more like European art film, where, even though you’ve watched the movie 20 times, you’re still not sure what its about,” he said.

Advances in technology have opened up new realms in photography, and Apicella-Hitchcock said he’s particularly intrigued by cameras that can now operate in extremely low light, without the need for flashes. But in the end, he said a good photograph always depends more on the human behind the camera.

“I think it was Paul Strand who said in order to make a good photograph, you have to have something to say about the world. Photography is still all about encoding that image with the photographer’s sensibilities, intelligence, and sensitivity to whoever or whatever was in front of them,” he said.

Documentary Photography: Japan, a visual arts class taught over the winter break by Fordham Artist-in-Residence Stephan Apicella-Hitchcock, introduced undergraduates to the booming metropolises of Tokyo and Kyoto.

Students were tasked with developing an emphasis on generating documentary projects focusing on the people, culture, and architecture of Japan. Their 10-day trip will be further documented in a professional-quality book that will include essays detailing the richness of their experience abroad.