Why?
The war in Ukraine was American photojournalist Wolfgang Schwan’s first experience covering a war. “I wanted to know more about the war in Donbas for my own education,” Schwan says. He had been following the situation there since 2015. When a new flare up was imminent, Schwan made the trip. He spent two months in Donbas before the war reached there, talking to Ukrainian soldiers and photographing their everyday lives. “I wanted to educate myself as much as I could, to better understand what brought so many young men to the far side of their country to fight in a very cold war in trenches. My goal was to focus only on the soldiers,” he states. “Once the war began, access to the military became increasingly difficult so my focus shifted to the daily news of missile strikes and Russian advances around Kyiv. Instead of documenting soldiers on the frontline, I found greater purpose in helping to show what was happening to the civilians forced to flee their towns, load their children on trains heading west, those who lost everything to shelling, the first responders who risk their lives to arrive at rocket strikes searching for survivors. The everyday stories of how humans continue to navigate the upheaval of life is what inspired me to continue to work there.”
Australian photographer Stephen Dupont was also in Ukraine. Dupont has documented many wars and his motivation is always the same. “For me, it’s really looking at human rights, looking at humanity, and how inhumane war is. It’s incredibly important to witness and document that kind of behaviour, that story. I’ve always looked at photography in a historical sense and because wars are often the big
