Safe Place: Book

Photography has become our safe place. At a time when the propaganda of the neighboring state tells you that you and your country have no right to exist, you want to assert your- self and record the fact that you do exist.

This is my house, this is how I look now. This is my yard, my street. Tomorrow, all of this may not be there anymore.

On February 24, 2022, Russia continued a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began back in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimean Peninsula. The war came to everyone’s home, it was not a movie or a dream.

After the paralysis had let me go on the 21st day, ideas and desire to do something started coming to me. I decided to offer photographers from Ukraine, of any age or gender, to keep a visual diary together: to call each other every week and dis- cuss what they are photographing. After the announcement of the idea on social media, we received more than 100 appli- cations.

Thus, from March 2022, I have a weekly practice of meeting with young Ukrainian artists. I plan to continue doing this until the war is over, or as long as I can. In the book, you will see stories of 16 photographers from Berlin, Lublin, Medyka, Wroclaw, Warsaw, Lviv, Lutsk, Cher- kasy, Kremenchuk, Kyiv, and Zhytomyr.

A photographer of a well-known foreign mass media will not come to the yard of a relatively peaceful and calm city to shoot a story and publish it somewhere in a magazine. But this does not mean that there is no war there. Everyone lives it through in their own way, and these stories are important and worth telling. Photography has become our safe place.

Sometimes there are no words to convey what you feel. Sometimes you don’t know what you feel, but you can show it. This is not war photography, but photography created in the context of war. The visual language spoken by the project participants is relatable for every Ukrainian. I hope you will be to relate to it as well.

Idea, curation, production: Iryna Yeroshko

Design: Nadiia Vilia Illustrations: Olha Franchuk

You can see all projects here:

safeplace.in.ua