Ira Lupu had been planning a photography show about Ukraine for a while but on 24 February, when Russian tanks arrived and missiles started to rain down on her homeland, things pivoted horribly. “We had two weeks to get it ready,” says the New York-based photographer. “And no budget – we’re not the Guggenheim.”
But help was at hand. Picto New York printed all the works for free, while the Magnum Foundation provided sponsorship. Digital photographs, normally easy to source, could be a problem, though: photojournalist Maxim Dondyuk “is in a field, literally running around with a helmet in a war zone in a precarious situation”, explains Lupu. “Some of the works we requested from him were on a hard drive he won’t get to any time soon.”
