Olena Grom: ‘After 2022, Simply Showing War Is No Longer Enough’

Acclaimed Ukrainian photographer Grom tells Kyiv Post about her multimedia project “Pietà,” children shaped by war, and ethical responsibility of photography in an age of profound pain. Make us preferred on Google Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Ukrainian photographer Olena Grom. (Image by Olena Grom) Content Share Facebook X (Twitter) LinkedIn Bluesky Email Copy Copied Flip Make us preferred on Google Ukrainian photographer Olena Grom has become one of the defining visual voices documenting Russia’s war against Ukraine through photography, text, and collective memory. Her recent multimedia project “Pietà,” presented in Kyiv, focuses on the mothers of fallen Ukrainian soldiers – an intimate and devastating meditation on grief, dignity, and survival. Her works have been exhibited in Italy, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the UAE, and beyond, while her wartime projects have drawn strong international attention and earned some of the photography world’s most prestigious honors, including Photo Oxford 2025. Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official . On March 9, 2026, Grom received Ukraine’s highest cultural distinction, the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine, the Ukraine’s highest state honor for culture and the arts – for “Stolen Spring,” a photographic series portraying women from the Kyiv region who lost their homes, loved ones, and even the possibility of experiencing spring as a season of renewal during the Russian occupation. In an interview with Kyiv Post, Grom reflects on how photography became a form of survival after losing her home in Donetsk, where the line lies between documentation and emotional exhaustion, and why she believes photographers today must search for a new ethical language to speak about war. Other Topics of Interest America Should Rediscover the Soft Power Potential of Its Music What made jazz – the quintessential American music – dangerous was not the sound, but the idea behind it: improvisation, spontaneity, individual voice. “When I left Donetsk in 2014, it wasn’t only a physical displacement,” Grom says. “It was a rupture with my entire previous life. Photography stopped being just a profession or an art form. It became a way to survive and to reorganize reality.” Born and raised in Donetsk, Grom initially turned to street photography after being forced to flee the city following Russia’s first invasion of eastern Ukraine. Wandering unfamiliar streets with a camera, she says, helped her regain a sense of structure and control. “The camera gave me a language,” she explains. “At first I didn’t know how to approach war without becoming superficial or exploitative. I needed time to find an ethical and visual form.” After studying at three photography schools, Grom began consciously working with war-related themes around 2016 and started traveling regularly to frontline towns and villages in the Donbas region the following year. “There I understood that photography is not only about testimony,” she says. “It is also about memory and responsibility.” For Grom, Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 fundamentally changed the role of photographers in Ukraine. “After 2022, war became a total environment – a condition of existence that penetrates everything,” she says. “Before, photography was primarily about witnessing and recording. Suddenly, that was no longer enough.” The flood of wartime imagery – destroyed buildings, wounded bodies, grief, trauma – created what she describes as a dangerous visual saturation. “There is a very thin line between testimony and repetition,” Grom says. “Between documentation and exhausting the viewer. Between truth and visual tautology.” At the same time, she became acutely aware of photography’s political and moral power. “The camera also becomes an instrument of influence,” she says. “A way to make the world see what might otherwise remain invisible.” During the first months of the full-scale invasion, Grom says she often felt like “a photographer in a state of mobilization,” driven by the feeling that whatever she was doing was still insufficient compared to the scale of the catastrophe unfolding around her. That realization pushed her away from simply producing more images and toward deeper reflection on how war transforms people, landscapes, and memory itself. “Today my role is not only to document reality,” she says. “It is also to build ethical relationships with the people I photograph and with reality itself.” Although Grom is often associated with documentary portrait photography, she sees her work as something more layered and emotionally complex. “I’m interested in showing people as alive and impossible to reduce to a single frame,” she says. “Portraits for me are never isolated. They exist together with landscape, memory, traces of time, and the invisible consequences of war.” This approach became especially pronounced in “Stolen Spring,” the project that earned her the Shevchenko Prize. “For me, the project is not important because it is ‘bigger’ than my previous work,” Grom explains. “What changed was my way of thinking about the image itself.” She describes the series as a dialogue not only with present-day Ukraine, but also with the historical visual memory of war. “I wanted to show people separately from destruction,” she says. “The ruins define the scale and context, but the people in these photographs do not merge with that space. They preserve distance, strength, and subjectivity.” Another defining feature of Grom’s work is the integration of text alongside photography. In many of her projects, written testimonies appear not as captions, but as an independent narrative voice. “Photography captures what is visible,” she says. “But very often it leaves outside the frame the experience, the circumstances, and the internal condition of a person.” For Grom, text restores agency to her subjects. “It is important to me that people do not become only objects of visual observation,” she explains. “Their words allow them to be heard directly.” Much of Grom’s long-term work has focused on children growing up under the shadow of war – a subject she describes as deeply personal. “At some point I realized I was not speaking only about ‘other people’s children,’” she says. “I was also speaking about my own children and about what could have happened to them.” Her son, she notes, experienced displacement, separation from grandparents, and life under constant missile threats. “War became part of his childhood,” she says quietly. Since 2016, Grom has documented children living near the front line in eastern Ukraine. Some, she says, have never known a life without war. After the full-scale invasion, many of the children she photographed earlier ended up under occupation, became refugees, suffered injuries, or were killed. In her ongoing project “Generation,” Grom documents young Ukrainians who will soon become the adult citizens shaping Ukraine after the war. “This generation is already growing up inside a militarized reality,” she says. “And it is important to preserve evidence of that.” Despite the documentary nature of her work, Grom resists describing it as a conventional archive of war. “I don’t work with the idea of complete or objective documentation,” she says. “What I create are fragments of experience filtered through my own presence, empathy, and perspective.” Rather than recording history as a factual chronology, Grom says she works with emotional states, memory, and the fragile relationship between people and their surroundings. “In every project,” she says, “I build my own methodology – a way of seeing reality that combines documentary evidence with artistic construction.” Myroslava Makarevych has more than 30 years of experience as a journalist and editor. She has worked for BBC Ukrainian Service; for a number of publishing houses in Ukraine, like HFS (ELLE Ukraine), Edipresse and Sanoma Media (Sensa.Ukraine editor-in-chief). She collaborates with various socio-political media including zn.ua; nv.ua. She is the author of 7 original fairy tale books for children, and 3 publicist books.