‘Good Evening We Are From Ukraine’ follows a community of Ukrainian women and children who have arrived in Moorhaven, Devon, UK after being uprooted by Russia’s invasion.
When Ukrainian refugees first started to arrive in Moorhaven, a village on the foothills of the open moorland Dartmoor, it seemed impossible that the consequences of a single, fatal decision had reached some of Devon’s most rural and remote regions. For the first time since the blitz, households were choosing to open up their doors to strangers from a far corner of the world despite that many had voted to leave the European Union. Through those doors came people who would never have heard of Devon had it not been for war - and now this strange place would have to be called home.
I was working as a photojournalist covering local news events; traffic, fires, shop openings. The arrival of refugees here, of all places, made everything else feel insignificant. I started this project wanting to understand what happens to refugees when they are received with collective empathy. Overtime, it turned into a project on how to create belonging as an outsider and the resilience of the Ukrainian spirit.
The title of this project are lyrics from a song that has become a symbol of Ukraine's resistance within the country. The words were printed on the T-shirt of a boy I photographed on his sixth birthday after arriving in Devon.
