Olga and Nikolay Grinik in old Avdeevka, Donetsk Oblast
(Picture: Anastasia Taylor-Lind)When war broke out in February 2022, Anastasia Taylor-Lind didn’t hesitate. She hopped on a plane to the Polish border and spent the next week photographing the Ukrainian refugees as they arrived exhausted and shell-shocked from their ordeal. As they broke their journey in repurposed sports centres, often sleeping for the first time in days, Taylor-Lind was there with her camera, a makeshift photography studio and a kind word.
As she worked, a trickle soon became a deluge. “All I heard for the first two months of covering the war – wherever I was, in Poland, in Kyiv – was the sound of wheelie suitcases, just hundreds and hundreds of them,” says the photographer. “In every city, every town: everywhere I was, you just heard this constant trundle. An estimated 12 million people are displaced. So that’s 12 million suitcases.”
