In 2011, meanwhile, Balazs Gardi – a seasoned war photographer and the recipient of multiple World Press Photo awards – used his iPhone and a cheap and readily available app called Hipstamatic (designed to give your holiday snaps a vintage feel) in Afghanistan. Some of the most affecting photographs of the First World War that I have ever seen were taken by soldiers with no photographic experience using flimsy, so-called “vest pocket cameras”, but still those pictures, of swimming in a river or making fun of the enemy, are capable of making the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, 100 years later. I’m not suggesting that only professional photographers, or those with elite equipment, can take a “good” picture of war.

Kurilo looks as if she’s about to tell you something. Taken by Wolfgang Schwan (an American photographer who works for the likes of the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal), the photograph became symbolic not just because it is striking – shocking, even – but because it humanises the story. There’s a reason why the bloody and bandaged face of Olena Kurilo, a 53-year-old teacher injured in the bombing of Chuhuiv, is everywhere. Of course, not all images of war are the same. Content from Ukraine on the video platform TikTok, for instance, is acquiring billions of views a day, as Ukrainians share scenes from the frontline in real time. The current conflict is, though, the first time that the communication of it has been so insistently visual. This isn’t the first war to unfurl on social media: those networks’ quickened uprisings across the Arab world in 2011, for instance, and camera phone pictures were “key to the coverage of the London bombings in 2005”, says Hilary Roberts, senior curator of photography at the Imperial War Museum, which acquired that material for its collection.

It is hard to absorb the pictures, let alone evaluate them.

A witches’ brew of smartphones, social media and canny algorithms has created a tide of frontline footage that would have been inconceivable 20 years ago, and with it comes a side of unfamiliar emotions to digest. I ask, because nine days into the conflict in Ukraine, we are already drenched in images of it. Indelible in a way that words sometimes struggle to be. A good one is dense and rich as a poem, a prickle at the breastbone. How do you convey the complexities of war? Its chaos and tedium and indiscriminate cruelty.

Have a nice life unnatural world