Births, deaths and a first kiss: life near the frontline in Ukraine – in pictures
Guardian Sta·2026-04-29·via The Guardian
Aria Shahrokhshahi went to teenage discos and hospital wards rattled by rockets in order to capture how it feels when your country is dragged into a war
‘Tangible excitement’ … The First Kiss, 2024
Wed 29 Apr 2026 07.00 BST
Masha, 2025
Wet Ground is a long-term body of work by British-Iranian artist Aria Shahrokhshahi, developed through repeated stays living and volunteering in Ukraine since 2019. Made from inside the war rather than in response to it, Shahrokhshahi’s activist approach rejects spectacle in favour of proximity, attending to the rhythms, contradictions and fragile continuities of daily life under prolonged violence. Wet Ground by Aria Shahrokhshahi is published by Loose Joints
The Shop Floor, 2025
Shot in stark black and white, Wet Ground moves beyond the visual shorthand of war imagery, presenting scenes that are domestic, absurd, performative or oblique. A recurring focus on youth and subculture reflects the improvised paths life takes in the present moment
Bodya, 2025
The title Wet Ground links Shahrokhshahi’s survival of a rocket strike during a medical evacuation, to the unstable terrain of a country in rapid transformation, where safety and danger exist in close proximity, forming an embodied account of a country resisting erasure while life continues under pressure
The Epiphany of Christ, 2025
Shahrokhshahi explores the slippery terrain of Ukrainian identity through an engaged, embedded and poetic approach to social documentary made on the frontlines of Russia’s full-scale invasion
Welcome baby Theo, 2023
Aria Shahrokhshahi: ‘The day Theo was born, there was an unprecedented ballistic missile attack on Kyiv, hitting civilian infrastructure. His parents were understandably incredibly stressed. I can’t imagine what it must feel like, having to give birth while rockets slam into your home city. There are so many endings in war: destruction, death. I thought it was interesting to focus on a new beginning. It’s a photo I’d disregarded from the project for years, and it wasn’t until Sarah Chaplin Espenon at Loose Joints and I were editing that its real weight showed itself’
Bus Station, 2022
‘This was maybe the first photograph I made after the start of the full-scale invasion. I’d taken a coach from Poland to Lviv. The bus station had been converted into a makeshift shelter for internally displaced people, and there was something deeply affecting about it’
Come Wander With Me, 2024
‘This is an old Ukrainian pagan tradition to celebrate the summer solstice. During the Soviet Union, Ukrainian culture, language, tradition, music and history was attempted to be wiped out, often very violently. Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, I saw a real reclamation of Ukrainian tradition across all spheres. I wanted to make space to celebrate that within the work’
The First Kiss, 2024
‘The kids invited us to an under-18s nightclub, 30km from the frontline. Daily drone and missile attacks, and then this: the awkwardness, the tangible excitement of a first kiss, the friend sitting to one side not knowing what to do, the grip of the boy’s hand on the girl’s shoulder, her hand hovering below his chin. There’s something so beautifully human and innocent about it. It’s relatable in a way that war almost never is’
Alex, 2024
‘Alex was a school teacher before the full-scale invasion. He has a collection of maybe 100-plus succulents that he meticulously cares for, everything perfectly labelled with individual care instructions. Duality has been something that’s interested me in the context of Ukraine, and I feel this photograph really represents that: how dramatically a person’s identity can shift’
Backstage at the Beauty Pageant, 2024
‘I have no interest in war photography, nor am I a war photographer. I’m interested in a much slower form of image-making. What the full-scale invasion did was make the contrast between things even more pronounced. I travelled to Odessa to photograph the Little Miss Ukraine pageant. It’s up to the viewer to decide what they make of it: they might find it beautiful and resilient, or bizarre that a children’s beauty pageant still takes place during the largest land war in Europe since the second world war’
Vika, 2023
Aria Shahrokhshahi (born in 1996) is a British-Iranian multi-disciplinary artist, whose practice has been shaped by a deep fascination with the intricate dynamics of diverse communities and the complexities of the human condition
Ester, 2024
With a focus on social structures and the human experience, Shahrokhshahi’s work serves as a critical exploration of the relationships and power dynamics that inform everyday life
