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Births, deaths and a first kiss: life near the frontline in Ukraine – in pictures

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The Shop Floor, 2025
Bodya, 2025
Shahrokhshahi explores the slippery terrain of Ukrainian identity through an engaged, embedded and poetic approach to social documentary made on the frontlines of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
Made from inside the war rather than in response to it, Shahrokhshahi’s activist approach rejects spectacle in favour of proximity, attending to the rhythms, contradictions and fragile continuities of daily life under prolonged violence.
Shot in stark black and white, Wet Ground moves beyond the visual shorthand of war imagery, presenting scenes that are domestic, absurd, performative or oblique.
A recurring focus on youth and subculture reflects the improvised paths life takes in the present moment. The title Wet Ground links Shahrokhshahi’s survival of a rocket strike during a medical evacuation, to the unstable terrain of a country in rapid transformation, where safety and danger exist in close proximity, forming an embodied account of a country resisting erasure while life continues under pressure.
The First Kiss, 2024 ‘The kids invited us to an under-18s nightclub, 30km from the frontline. Daily drone and missile attacks, and then this: the awkwardness, the tangible excitement of a first kiss, the friend sitting to one side not knowing what to do, the grip of the boy’s hand on the girl’s shoulder, her hand hovering below his chin. There’s something so beautifully human and innocent about it. It’s relatable in a way that war almost never is.”
Alex, 2024 ‘He was a school teacher before the full-scale invasion. He has a collection of maybe 100-plus succulents that he meticulously cares for, everything perfectly labelled with individual care instructions. Duality has been something that’s interested me in the context of Ukraine, and I feel this photograph really represents that: how dramatically a person’s identity can shift.’
Backstage at the Beauty Pageant, 2024 ‘I have no interest in war photography, nor am I a war photographer. I’m interested in a much slower form of image making. What the full-scale invasion did was make the contrast between things even more pronounced. I travelled to Odessa to photograph the Little Miss Ukraine pageant. It’s up to the viewer to decide what they make of it: they might find it beautiful and resilient, or bizarre that a children’s beauty pageant still takes place during the largest land war in Europe since the Second World War.’
Vika, 2023
Ester, 2024

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