What personally drew you to working with Third Places within the “Ye Mistechko” program — and which encounters and personal stories have stayed with you most?
I simply love all of Ukraine; I love traveling — so this was honestly the best possible assignment, because there really are a huge number of these (Third) Places spread across the entire country. And so many of those Third Places were genuinely wonderful encounters. One that really struck me, for instance, was Zeleni Hai — a badly destroyed village in the middle of the steppe that lived through active combat in 2022 and 2023. Despite the obvious challenges of rebuilding, they’ve already accomplished so much. The guys and girls at that Third Place are actively running events. It’s a tiny village, yet twenty people get together, something is always happening — and it’s really something to watch. And they say it with such conviction: “We’re going to build a park, and young people will walk through it, and honestly, nobody will want to leave Zeleni Hai.” It's obvious they have a deep love for that place, their village. Furthermore, they sort their waste and care about the environment. They’ve even banned artificial flowers in the cemetery. It already looks like the challenges of development rather than the challenges of survival, which is what you might expect when thinking about a village like that. And that’s really, genuinely amazing.
I was incredibly curious to see what the country is living through, what life looks like in small towns and villages that I never get to as an ordinary Ukrainian, and that I never get to as a journalist either. For me, this was a chance to get to the kinds of places where local people gather, where they spend time — to see them, to listen, to understand how they live, and how they fill their days.
How does the Russian war against Ukraine affect the people you’ve encountered — and how does that show up in your photographs, especially in the way everyday life, war, and memory all come together?
War is people’s everyday reality. I keep coming back to this story from Okhtyrka, where I witnessed a lot of activity at a Third Place — various workshops for children, for adults, and so on. I was shooting everything, but the really candid conversation happened after everyone had gone home and maybe ten people were left, mostly older women. I asked them something about the beginning of the Russian war. Even though they weren’t occupied — since active combat there ended relatively quickly — people just started talking all at once, tripping over each other’s words: one had watched an armored personnel carrier roll past her house; another had fled through a field into the forest in the dark. And you can see it still hurts them deeply.
That’s exactly the value of these Third Places, it seems to me — people can not only do things there, but they can simply talk to one another. It matters enormously that they have somewhere they can come and speak, and share what everyday life just doesn’t make room for. That’s precisely why it’s a Third Space — not home and not work. It works effectively as a community-building place. And it was really powerful — listening to them, watching them finally get to say what they needed to say.
Or, for example, in Konotop I was shooting during some truly brutal blackouts (power outages. Note: As a result of Russian strikes targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, electricity was cut across the entire country, sometimes for 4 consecutive days), and they were running a 3D-printing class by the light of battery-powered flashlights. High tech under very difficult conditions. This isn’t the low-tech life we choose — it’s the low-tech life that exists because the Russians are trying to drag people backward, while those people are busy learning to work with new technologies. And those contrasts are so stark. Though, of course, the situation is terrible.
And even when people come to libraries just to return books, they do it in the dark, by flashlight. It looks like something out of another world: the twenty-first century, the heart of Europe — and these are the conditions. But they live. They cope. And that is something very, very powerful.
Almost all of these Third Places sit right at the center of village or town — either by the village council building or by the library. Memorial sites stand nearby, where a minute of silence is held every morning at nine. And all of that shows you the life of these places and towns, the space where war is always with us, an unavoidable reality.
What role do you think photography can play in shaping memory and shared experience — and how do you approach memorialization through images without reducing or simplifying what people have lived through?
For me as a documentary photographer, this is essentially the foundation of the work — creating memory. Memory of what these times looked like, what the war looked like, what people looked like, what certain practices looked like.
I’m from eastern Ukraine myself, and I’ve been documenting the war since 2014. I started in a small town in Donetsk Oblast. Back then, at the beginning of the Russian war against Ukraine, we didn’t exactly call it a war. Maybe it was a different form of it, and certainly no one thought it would go on this long, or that there would be a full-scale war, or that over time we’d be comparing different phases of this same war.
Time has passed now, and what I have is a large archive, which keeps growing. What I’m documenting right now is what we’ll look back on to understand what the war looked like in this moment.
In that context, it’s also fascinating to travel to these places and see how the same villages have changed — like along the Novo Basan route, which was first under occupation and then freed. I went there right after it was liberated — there was destruction everywhere, and Russian flags were painted on things. It was a very, very hard thing to look at. But it is astonishing to see the Third Place library active again, local spots and shops up and running, and everything rebuilt. You can actually trace that progress through my photographs.
