Photo Essay Grozny – Then and Now – Eric Bouvet

Eric Bouvet covered the Second Chechen War from October to December of 1999, and returned in February 2000. Bouvet traveled with three Russian officers during his second visit to the region and witnessed up-close the destruction and decay of a country ravaged by war. In Grozny, Chechnya’s capital city, buildings were all but leveled, tens of thousands were dead, and radioactive material polluted the area in the wake of storage facility bombings. “Nothing remained,” Bouvet recounted, “just a huge, imposing void.” When he returned in March 2008, Bouvet found Grozny as a city in the process of rebirth. Civilians, totaling only about 5,000 in number, were carrying on with daily life and were starting the task of rebuilding a once magnificent city. As he revisited places he had photographed in his earlier trips to the region, Bouvet not only documented the modernization of a city, but the will and determination of a people rising from the ashes of war. 

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