“When our paths cross” is the fourth part of my work on Ukraine, which began in 2023.
With this series, I wanted to focus on encounters: with people and places during my travels through Ukraine, which began in 2024.
To leave room for chance, the unpredictable, the encounter itself.
As I wander across the country, through streets and along paths, my only aim is perhaps to cross paths with someone who will stir an emotion, a desire to make their portrait. To let the magic of the encounter unfold.
It is also about discovering places that inspire me, speak to my subconscious and tell the story I want to narrate. All that remains is to meet the characters I have imagined for that story, those my own subjectivity wants to show you.
Using chance to tell a story.
My intention is to share my view of Ukrainian society and photograph fragments of my reality. To invite viewers to reflect on what it means to be a soldier, to be sixteen in Donbas or five in Kharkiv, to be a woman alone or a mother whose everyday life is consumed by war. To speak about people whose lives have been changed forever.
What hopes remain? What expectations? Can anyone recover from such a conflict? These are some of the many questions I asked myself while making these photographs.
“When our paths cross” portrays a Ukraine exhausted by years of war — my portrait of the daily lives of children, women and men whose worlds have been overturned by a conflict they did not choose.
