Ukrainian children are taking the photographic reins in a project run by local non-profit Behind Blue Eyes, a team keen to help children get through trauma with creativity. The team travel across frontline villages and hand out disposable cameras to enable the youngsters to document their everyday lives. The results, then displayed online, are accompanied by the photographer’s wishlist, with Behind Blue Eyes raising funds to try to realise it.
For Artem Skorokhodko, co-founder of Behind Blue Eyes, the resilience of the local children amidst ruined places spurred the initiative. ‘This energy and drive felt almost bizarre back in April 2022, so we began cracking our heads [about] how to encapsulate this emotion and share it with other people across Ukraine who might desperately need it. At the same time, we wanted to celebrate and support what we admired in those kids so much. The photography experiment addressed both [aims].’
The resulting photographs capture sometimes idyllic-seeming scenes, jarring when set against the glimpses of devastation behind. The children take photos of flowers, of each other, of their possessions in disarray, ignoring the surrounding chaos.
‘It's not even the pictures [that surprised us] as such, although they were extraordinary,’ Skorokhodko adds. ‘We have been majorly surprised to see how these kids opened up and became vocal about the traumatic experiences they had to go through because of the war while they were scrolling through their own images. They spoke about things that would normally be avoided in conversation.'
He continues, ‘The greatest moment was to collect all the cameras back a couple of weeks after distributing them [the first time around]. Given that the youngest participant was seven years old, and we [set] absolutely no limits on this creative endeavour, my bet was that only half of the cameras would make it through, while the rest would be lost, damaged, cracked open… I was wrong then and every single time [since].’
