How do you live when tomorrow isn’t guaranteed?

Like most photographers covering conflict, I have documented damaged apartment blocks, soldiers on the front line, grieving families and the aftermath of missile strikes.

‍

Those images matter.

‍

But over time I have found myself turning my camera elsewhere, towards children playing, teenagers swimming in rivers, artists working from their homes, and families trying to preserve a sense of routine amid extraordinary circumstances. At first glance, some of these photographs barely register as war photography at all.

‍

The longer I spend in Ukraine, the more I realise that war is not only measured by what it destroys. It is also measured by what people refuse to surrender.

‍

There is a danger, when a war continues for years, that the people living through it become symbols before they are allowed to remain people. Soldiers become bravery. Children become innocence. Ruins become evidence. But the people I photograph are never just examples of something else. They have jokes, ambitions, habits, private griefs, ordinary plans. They were not born to become metaphors for war.

‍

When the war escalated in 2022, I co-founded Postcode Ukraine, a hybrid art and aid charity built around one conviction: that the lives lived in the shadow of war deserve to be seen with as much seriousness as the destruction around them.

‍

A photograph cannot stop a missile. It cannot bring back the dead. But it can ask the viewer not to look away. It can remind us that Ukraine is not only a place of loss, but a country of people still making meaning, still protecting tenderness, still refusing to let violence become the only thing the world sees.

‍

If these images endure, I hope it is because they preserve what the fighting could not destroy: lives still being lived.

‍