When our paths cross

"When Our Paths Cross" is the fourth chapter of my photographic journey in Ukraine, an odyssey that began in 2023. This series is born from a desire for encounter. Not the kind we provoke, but the kind we welcome. The kind that arises, unpredictable, between two streets, around a bend in a path, in the uncertain light of a morning or in the ruins of a shattered daily life. Letting the unexpected open the doors, letting the roads lead me to the faces, the gazes, the gestures that speak to me. Letting the heart decide that it is time to make a portrait. Wandering the streets of Kharkiv, following the trails of Donbas, waiting in Kyiv for a gaze to strike me. I walk, I drift, I let the places call to me and the faces emerge. It is not so much the image that I seek, but the truth of a presence. An emotion that arises, a fragment of light in the tumult. This project is above all an attempt to draw a sensitive portrait of contemporary Ukrainian society, caught in the grip of a conflict that redefines everything: identity, daily life, the future. Through the faces I photograph, I try to understand what it means to live here. It is not only about photographing faces, but recognizing them — in the strongest sense — as bearers of a truth, of a fragment of the Ukrainian soul. And then there are the places. These spaces where something invisible resonates, an inner echo, a silent memory. Landscapes that tell me a story even before I press the shutter. Then I wait for the silhouette to appear, the one my imagination had already drawn, the one reality offers me. This work is a fragile weaving between chance and gaze. An attempt to tell today’s Ukraine through my own fragments of reality. Through these images, I question what it means to be a teenage girl in a bombed city, a 20-year-old soldier, a grandmother left alone in her village, a mother who waits. Through these portraits, I want to show lives that have been upended, existences suspended in a time of war. Men, women, children who are fighting not only for their survival, but to preserve their identity, their language, their culture — this culture that Russia seeks to erase. What hopes still inhabit them? What wounds remain invisible? Can one truly be reborn after such a tearing apart? What does it mean to be Ukrainian today? A sensitive attempt to answer these questions — or at least to formulate them. It is my gaze — subjective, sincere — on a Ukraine standing tall in the turmoil, the Ukraine of anonymous faces, of wounded daily lives, of encounters that will mark me forever. "When Our Paths Cross" is a subjective mapping of these faces encountered, of these stories guessed. A visual journal of a wounded, yet standing Ukraine. A way of saying: I saw you, I heard you, and I make you visible.