We Are Not Youth Any Longer

The project explores the militarization of the EU’s eastern border, between Poland and the Baltics, through the lives of young generations. It examines how defense policies and geopolitical tensions reshape personal horizons.

We Are Not Youth Any Longer investigates the lives of young generations growing up along the eastern border of the European Union, between Poland and the Baltic States, within a landscape increasingly shaped by militarization and strategic fortification. In recent years, this region has become central to Europe’s shifting geopolitical balance. Defense infrastructures, reinforced borders, and national preparedness programs are transforming both territory and collective perception. Beyond political strategy, however, this transformation unfolds within everyday life.

The project focuses on adolescents and young adults inhabiting these borderlands, individuals whose coming of age coincides with a renewed language of deterrence, security, and potential conflict. The title, borrowed from All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, evokes the abrupt loss of innocence experienced by soldiers confronting war. Here, it becomes a metaphor for a generation negotiating its future within a climate of uncertainty.

Moving between portraiture and landscape, the work traces subtle tensions embedded in ordinary spaces and reflects on how political decisions reverberate through personal horizons. It questions what it means to grow up in a Europe redefining its borders not only geographically, but psychologically. Through a journey along the borderlands, the project positions photography as a space of inquiry, examining how narratives of security permeate everyday life and quietly reshape personal experience.