How the War in Ukraine Altered Life for a Lost Generation

One evening in the winter of 2022, Daria Svertilova was wandering through one of Kyiv’s central parks. Amid a months-long invasion by Russia, and plunged into darkness by a city-wide blackout, she stumbled on a statue of the archangel Michael, the patron saint of Kyiv. In the Bible, the archangel Michael acts as god’s chief prince; he often appears in dreamlike, prophetic visions of the future that promise the fall of empire. 

“It was the darkest time of the year, and I was feeling deeply sad,” she told me. “In that moment, the archangel’s presence amidst the darkness felt deeply symbolic.” 

The image she took—Protector of Kyiv—anchors her series Irreversibly Altered, which documents the grief and emptiness of the war in Ukraine. The archangel is situated against a blue-black sky in full regalia, fighting off an unseen foe. 

When the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, Svertilova was in Paris, finishing her master’s degree in photography and video at École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD). Ultimately, she decided to postpone her graduation, abandon that project, and respond to the present moment—her present moment. 

In the months following the invasion, Svertilova stayed in France, reading updates about the war during the day and dreaming about it at night. The tendency toward expressive images came from her own need to excise her nightmarish visions and the realization that many other talented photographers were documenting the war in a straightforward way. She had no interest in replicating their work when she went back to Ukraine.  

The characters and scenes in Irreversibly Altered hint at dispossession and pain, but never show it directly: an empty, red-tinged street a night, portraits of exhausted youths, a still life of dying flowers, shadowy figures floating around dimly lit interiors. While many photographers around her were documenting the war in Ukraine journalistically, Svertilova chose to channel the emotional dislocation around her into impressionistic images instead. 

Irreversibly Altered’s aesthetics are also rooted in Svertilova’s childhood training. Growing up, she took drawing classes and found inspiration in Renaissance paintings. She became interested in photography at age thirteen, experimenting with digital SLR cameras and an old Soviet Zenith camera inherited from her grandfather. She moved to Paris to become a working artist. 

“I didn’t come from an artistic family, and in Ukraine, art has never really been seen as a “real” profession—something you could do full-time.” 

Svertilova admits that while it pains her to see waning support for Ukraine abroad, she feels it’s natural to want to tune out of war, especially explicit images of war. More than ten years after the war started and with no end in sight, she is constantly asking: How can photographers speak about a war in a way that connects to people who are far from it? 

Irreversibly Altered offers answers. Rather than trying to capture a broader narrative, Svertilova focuses on her tight knit circle of friends and acquaintances: Artists working in freezing cold studios, former art curators and students who joined the army. They are all part of a lost generation who have undergone a dramatic transformation over the past three years. 

There were times when she felt like giving up, especially during constant power outages and living for days without heat and water during the dead of winter. She didn’t.  

“I realized that this work is about resistance—the resistance of Ukrainians who live through the war every day, and also my own, personal resistance,” she said. “This project taught me that you have to find strength and keep going, because in the end, the effort is worth it.” 

Daria Svertilova is a shortlisted artist for the 2025 Aperture Portfolio Prize, an annual international competition to discover, exhibit, and publish new talents in photography and highlight artists whose work deserves greater recognition.