“For me, it was the Cossacks’ answer to the sultan,” he said. “It seemed blindingly obvious.”
He decided to capture this spirit of defiance by recreating Repin’s painting in a modern setting. He spent months negotiating with the Ukrainian military to get armed troops to pose for the photograph and to find a safe place, north of Kyiv, to stage it. Some soldiers came straight from the front line, their mustachioed faces evoking the unruly Cossacks.
“They looked like they had stepped out of the painting!” said Andrii Malyk, the press officer for Ukraine’s 112th Territorial Defense Brigade, which participated in the project.
Mr. Lhuisset wanted the photograph to be as close to the painting as possible. He meticulously arranged the 30 or so soldiers, positioning their hands and asking them to freeze in bursts of hearty laughter to echo the energy of the original scene. Objects in the painting were replaced with modern equivalents: a slouch hat became a helmet; a musket transformed into a rocket launcher; a mandolin was swapped for a portable speaker.
A drone hovers in the sky, a nod to the aircraft with no crew that have become conspicuous on the battlefield.
