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.”
If this sounds like a rash move, it’s far from it. A seasoned veteran, Taylor-Lind has spent much of the last decade visiting Ukraine and its war-torn Donbas region, photographing its inhabitants and small communities.
This month, the first-ever exhibition of her work in her home city of London will be opening at the Imperial War Museum. Spanning almost a decade – from the 2014 Ukrainian Revolution to today’s ongoing war, they cover every aspect of life during war, from chaotic battle scenes to a woman grieving over her son’s grave in a flower-strewn field and an image of men building defences on the front line in Donetsk.
Taylor-Lind’s career has taken her everywhere, from the mounts of Kurdistan to Beirut, from displaced people’s camps in Bangladesh to war-torn Damascus. Her wanderlust arguably has its roots in her nomadic childhood.
“My parents were travelling in a horse drawn wagon when I was born,” she says. “Then, when I was a toddler, they bought a field in Devon… we went to live on the caravan, right on some farmer’s land. I grew up in a field in Devon.”
Growing up working class and without opportunities to travel inspired her to take up photography, she says – and it gave her a chance to expand her horizons, spending part of her degree photographing women Peshmerga fighters in Kurdistan.
After university, a self-funded project examining population decline sparked Taylor-Lind’s interest in Eastern Europe. It’s an area she’s returned to again and again in the years since.
“I bought a converted builder’s panel van with a bed in the back and I drove from London to the Moldova border, spent three months photographing, and I came home for Christmas,” she says.
That project took her all the way to Kyiv in time for the 2014 Maidan Uprising, a wave of demonstrations in protest against the Ukraine government’s decision not to sign the European Union-Ukraine Association Agreement, instead choosing to strengthen ties with their neighbour, Russia. She set up shop in the city’s main square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square), which had become the site of a huge protest camp. Installed metres behind the barricades, Taylor Lind took pictures of civilians in a makeshift studio with nothing but a helmet for protection.
On one particularly frenetic day, snipers took to the rooftops and started shooting civilians. After the regime’s president Viktor Yanukovych fled, she took pictures of the people coming to lay flowers in remembrance of the people killed. The results were eventually published in a book, Maidan - Portraits from the Black Square.
Despite her apparently sanguine response to this trial by fire, Taylor-Lind says that working on breaking news stories is not really her thing – though the exhibition does also feature images she took in the aftermath of the massacre in Bucha. Arriving in the days after the town was liberated, she was there to watch as a mass grave was exhumed under the watchful eyes of the world’s media and the local populace; later in the war, she photographed soldiers digging trenches outside the town of Sloviansk, which has been on the front line of Ukrainian resistance since the start of the war. However, she insists, “I’m not that kind of photo journalist.”
Instead, she prefers to focus on feature-writing, building up relationships with her subjects and returning to them over years to find out how they are and what they’ve been up to. To that end, she often uses an old Hasselblad camera, filling up rolls of film that she won’t see for six weeks or more: a process that she says makes for “more considered and intentional” pictures.
“I find making portraits of people, especially in emergency situations, less disturbing and painful,” she explains. “For me as an experience, it gives me a little bit more time with people. The process is a little bit more humanising.”
A look around the IWM exhibition shows some of her best. There’s an image of a pair of sisters, Lyudmyla and Nelya Tkachenko on their way over the border, eyes tired but faces resolute as they pose against a black backdrop; another series of photographs focuses on a friend, Yehven Shulga.
Though he appears beaten and bruised in the pictures from 2014 – he’s sporting two black eyes from his clashes with police – in the image taken in 2022 he’s standing tall and wielding a rifle, a new recruit to the Ukrainian army. He went on to use both her pictures on his Facebook profile: “the highest accolade for a photographer”, Taylor-Lind laughs.
One of her personal favourite images in the exhibition is of the Grinik family, feeding their horse in a small paddock on the outskirts of Donetsk. They were one of the few couples choosing to raise a young family in the war-torn region before the war – though most of them have since fled to central Ukraine, while father Nikolay has joined the army along with vast numbers of his young compatriots.
“I think the picture feels even more special to me now since the Russian invasion, because we know that’s really gone,” Taylor-Lind says. “They’re not going to be able to live like that again. Certainly not in that place.”
That same melancholy – a sense of things lost – underpins much of her work, and many of her most memorable moments on the frontline. Alongside her US-based Ukrainian colleague Alisa Sopova, Taylor-Lind has spent most of the war in Donetsk compiling a project titled ‘5km from the Frontline’, an experience that has seen her come within fifty metres of intense fighting and countless missile strikes.
Does she ever want to turn around and head back? Of course,she says: “all the time. And I do. Yeah, I want to live… it’s exceptionally risky to be within five kilometres of the front. Even a distance of a little greater than that, within artillery range, is very risky. Once you go there, you’re basically rolling the dice.”
And yet, she keeps coming back. As she puts it, she has friends in Ukraine, and though headlines about the country have been dominating the news for more than a year, Taylor-Lind wants to keep it up, to speak about them, and the war in general. Conflict fatigue is not an option.
“I think we need more stories about Ukraine, not less,” she says. “Stories that are more long term, more delicate and more nuanced. And ones that show how people keep living, and how to keep hope alive.”
Her spare time she devotes to poetry, in which she’s currently doing an MA. And, she says, she continues to grapple with the limitations of her art.
“Photography is a very limited medium,” she says. “Oh, a picture can tell a thousand words, except when it f***ing can’t. It’s just a picture. It’s just one way of telling stories, but it can’t tell everything. I wish it could.”
I think of a story Taylor-Lind told me earlier, of a recent visit she made to Donbas to see an old friend, Sasha. After his home was shelled in the first weeks of the war, Sasha moved to a camp for Internally Displaced People (IDP); Taylor-Lind visited him there, showed him pictures she’d taken of him when he first arrived.
“He just said, ‘Why did you make me look so sad?’” she remembers.
“I was really ashamed that he asked me that: I was ashamed of photography in that moment. So I just put my hand on his shoulder. And I was like, ‘But Sasha, life is sadder now, isn’t it?’”
