Table of Contents

Street Shooters of June 2023

In the Best Possible Light

The Poetry of Everyday Life in Wartime Ukraine

The Precise Moment

45 Years of Film

Freedom-Minded

The Poetry of Everyday Life in Wartime Ukraine

Richard Morgan

In the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022, I travelled to the country with a 35mm camera to photograph everyday life in the context of the war. I wanted to show the beautiful human moments that surely still existed in Ukrainian public life. Rather than the destruction and tragedy of war, I wanted to celebrate the beauty, colour, and poetry of social life in wartime Ukraine, a life that remains under serious threat from Russian attacks.

A Ukrainian family, father and husband dressed in military attire, on leave perhaps before returning to battle, simply enjoying their time together, laughing, intimate, affectionate, browsing a flea market, flying balloons the colour of their national flag, the lightness of which only exaggerates the heavy weight of the sandbags protecting the church behind them.

Ever since I did a master’s degree in Russian and East European Studies, I have had a keen interest in the area, its politics, history, cultures, and languages. In the years before the war, I’d spent much time in the region, whether on university research trips, language study, photographic commissions, or simply just travelling. So, my decision to go to Ukraine, while being the work of a freelance photographer, was also an extension of my own history, and my own fascination in the region that started at university almost twenty years ago.

I flew to Rzeszów in Eastern Poland, travelled by train to the Ukrainian border, where I stayed for a few days in Przemyśl, photographing at the train station and around the border crossing at Medyka. After obtaining my press pass from the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, without which it is almost impossible to photograph in the country, I took the first sleeper train across the border.

Christian missionaries pray for the life of a Soldier outside Przemyśl train station.
Foreign press surround a car at the border crossing at Medyka, making the unusual journey back into Ukraine from Poland. Journalists interview the driver, curious to find out the story about why they are returning to Ukraine, when so many are going in the opposite direction.

Over the course of the next month I photographed in Lviv, around its old town centre, at its markets, in its churches, in its parks, stations, and squares.

A woman taking a photograph of a young boy, stood in front of a public sign containing the words of a national slogan of defiance and wartime solidarity, customarily said on greeting and departing: “Glory to Ukraine; Glory to the Heroes”. A scene punctured with tiny details, a tapestry of contemporary Ukrainian life and messages, the national flag flying, a melancholic face of an advert looking longingly into the distance, a flow of people crossing the road, a stop sign.
A woman setting up her market stall, tying together taut string from which she’ll hang tarpaulin, the windows of a building in front of her, beside the market place, are boarded up, a protection against Russian rockets

I photographed across the streets of Kyiv, criss-crossing the city over and over by foot, documenting daily life, religious events, and military funerals.

A security guard carries the Orthodox cross across Maidan, Independence Square, following a funeral service for Volodymir Karas. Sandbags cover the ground, civilians and military personnel observe the coffin being carried away.
A Ukrainian woman poses for a photo shoot on Maidan, Independence Square, dressed in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag, echoed in the flag behind hanging high on the building. The photo shoot takes places amidst the Czech Hedgehogs, the static anti-tank obstacles made of metal angles, that are littered across the city’s streets.

And I photographed in Buzova, one of many formerly occupied towns and villages around the capital, where I was led by Ukrainian forces across recent battle zones, deserted Russian encampments, and formerly occupied settlements.

On the site of a recent battle ground, a photographer examines the insides of a destroyed Russian tank in a formerly occupied settlement in Buzova.
A photographer takes a picture of an unexploded missile on the site of a recent battle ground in Buzova.

But it was to the streets of Ukraine’s cities that I was drawn, and it was the life in, on, and around those streets and public spaces that I wanted to experience and represent through photography. The recent battle sites and formerly occupied settlements I had visited were, unsurprisingly, deathly quiet and still, devoid of life, and dull, whereas the streets of the cities, while not as busy as in peacetime, were dynamic, colourful, and in flux. To a street and documentary photographer like me, it was the flow and poetry of the urban public space that attracted me and pulled me in.

Woman and child holding hands as they walk through the streets, the morning of fatal rocket attacks in Lviv, minutes after the air raid siren ceased to fill the sky with its warning cry. Their loving gesture replicates or is echoed by the stature they pass, a cute repetition, life imitating art and art imitating life, framed by apartment blocks in the background and the bare trees of a city park.
A clock seller in a shop window, his big hand reaching for one of the time pieces on show to the public, reaching out for time itself, yet suspended in time moments before he can truly grasp it, frozen in the act of trying to keep hold of time, the city reflected in the window, framing the scene and his gesture, adding another layer, a depth.
A street cleaner scooping trash from the base of a statue in the old town square, an artefact of national and historical significance, now, like many heritage sites in Ukraine, whose value and meaning is irreplaceable, is invisible, encased in corrugated iron, protected from Russian rockets, from shrapnel, from falling buildings.
Two workmen outside a church, cordoned off by red tape, giving its step a lick of paint. A yellow streak sweeps across the frame, from left to right, through the yellow paint of the step, across to the municipal yellow of a passing city bus, and finally to the yellow of an advert high on a mobile network advert fixed to the side of building, above a similar one in blue, the inversion of the Ukrainian national flag.

So, almost a year on from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this photo essay looks back not at the tragedy of the conflict, but celebrates instead the colour, beauty, and poetry of Ukrainian social life during the early stages of the war. The photographs show not fighting but love, not the front line, but civil society in cities under attack from rocket strikes, not death, but life, not loss, but relationships, not suffering, but joy, not dullness, but colour, and not destruction and things broken, but togetherness and the remaking of life.

A couple pose for a photo with a kiss, stood within a temporary art installation, marking the coming of Easter, wicker baskets at their feet, decorated with decorated eggs, carrying food to be blessed at church.
A delivery driver delivering a huge balloon-carrying teddy bear, the same size as the girl receiving it on her doorstep, likely a birthday gift, a surprise, perhaps, a sure sign of the thought and care that bind relationships together, that connect people, that remind them they are loved and cherished, that they’re on the minds and in the hearts of others.
A man on his knees praying at the base of a 12-foot-high crucifix in the heart of the city centre, head bowed, forehead against wood, bent over below the symbol of sacrifice itself, standing high in front of apartment blocks and the street below.

The experience of doing street photography in Ukraine during the war was complex and certainly not easy. For a start, walking around in public with a camera aroused a lot of suspicion. Outside the context of war, street photography usually generates some suspicion from members of the public, and the behaviour of a street photographer – looking at things for long periods of time, stopping, running, loitering, kneeling, standing on things – does look odd and is certainly unusual. Now, add to this the fact that the Ukrainian government had launched a widespread public messaging campaign (think COVID and the visibility of the UK government’s public communications – signs, billboards, TV broadcasts, social media campaigns, etc.), encouraging social vigilance, alertness to suspicious behaviour, and (most importantly) being on the lookout for anyone taking pictures in public. So, in this context, with the fear of Russian ‘saboteurs’ very real and very high, the experience of doing street photography in Ukraine was, at that time, intense. So, each day, before I went out, I made sure my press pass was securely clipped to the breast pocket of my coat, clearly visible to anyone who wished to see who I was and what I was doing. And many people did exactly that, approaching me, looking closely at my press pass, and satisfied I was a British photographer and not a Russian spy, exchanged best wishes with me, and left me to get on with it.

Four soldiers sit at a bus stop in central Kyiv. Beside them one of many war-messaging posters exclaims that “Heroes Never Die”.
A vacant site selling potatoes on a backstreet corner, above which are graffitied the Ukrainian flag and the words: “Only Forward / Onwards”. A man to the right leans strangely over to one side, dodging the traffic, keeping balanced, keeping going forward and onwards.
A musician serenades the streets with his instrument, leaning into the tune, giving it meaning, while behind children play in the public realm, triumphantly raising plastic guns the colour of the Ukrainian flag, imitating soldiers, perhaps, playing a game of war in the context of the real thing.

The project illuminates and preserves in images the poetry of a way of life that is under threat. It celebrates the stoic continuation of Ukrainian people to keep on living with a sense of normality in circumstances that are far from normal.