Before We Knew

Before We Knew is an archive of everyday Kherson before Russia’s full-scale invasion. Sunlight, bodies, streets and small routines remain unchanged in the photographs, while our knowledge of what followed changes how we see them.

Before We Knew is a series of film photographs made in Kherson in 2020 and 2021, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

I began making these images when I got my first good film camera. I photographed without a project in mind: my home, my family, friends, animals, the streets around me, ordinary days and small things I wanted to remember. At the time, these photographs were simply part of my life.

After 2022, they became something else.

Some of the animals in these photographs are no longer alive. The people are alive, but many were forced to leave their homes. The places I photographed have been damaged or transformed, and I do not know whether the home I remember will still exist in a form I can return to.

What frightens me most is the possibility that I may never photograph it again.

I have always remembered the world through photographs. Because of this, every frame from those years has acquired an unexpected weight: not only the images presented in this project, but also the crooked ones, the blurred ones, the overexposed ones, the accidental photographs I would once have dismissed. They may be the last photographs I made of this place while it was still simply home.

The photographs contain no knowledge of what was coming. The people, animals and places inside them exist entirely in their present. I look at them from the future they could not know.

Before We Knew is not an attempt to reconstruct Kherson as it was, nor to make an inventory of what has been lost. It is a personal archive of ordinary life whose meaning changed after the photographs were made — and an attempt to understand what an image becomes when returning to its subject may no longer be possible.