As a Ukrainian, I never chose war. I became part of a generation of war and revolution.
I’ve been witnessing the Russian-Ukrainian war for more than 10 years now - with pauses - and I’m terribly afraid of silence. In war, silence is the harbinger of bad news. Silence about my war means no news about Ukraine - it’s when human lives are turned into maps, infographics, numbers - and it becomes all too easy to lose the human being in that.

War Is Personal is an ongoing visual diary of a Ukrainian reporting from Ukraine. 
I’m not a war photographer - this is a war happening in my country.

Wars painfully look the same. The wider image often erases the individual.
A drone shot can be powerful in showing the scale of destruction - but what about the human?
People don’t remember numbers. People remember people.
People don’t remember the trench - they remember the people in the trench.
I wanted to give the Russian-Ukrainian war a name and a face.

This is a multimedia project built on documentary photography, illustration, poetry, electronic music, and the live sound of the national Ukrainian instrument - the bandura.

“It is not enough to simply see war - you can always look away. To truly understand it, you must see, hear, smell, and touch. War is bigger than an image. In the storytelling I believe in, I engage all the senses. I truly believe it's easy to forget something you saw, but impossible to forget something you felt.”

War Is Personal is a cross-platform project. The photos, interviews, and poetry will be translated into multiple formats: a photo series, an interactive website, a photobook titled "SCAR / Мій любий шрам”, a music-poetry album, social media Reels, a photographic zine, a live performance, an audio-guide podcast, and an animated documentary.