As a photojournalists, we struggle with the urgent challenge of conveying how it feels to experience the violence, calamity and conflict. It can be hard for a person who lives somewhere safe and comfortable to truly fathom the loss and pain that war embodies. Too often in the coverage of conflict, we present images that seem to be from another planet, which can serve to alienate rather than evoke a greater understanding of the cost of war.
Throughout the brutal invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainians have struggled to keep their families and loved ones safe and protect their way of life. Ukrainian generosity, resistance, and kindness has sustained the country to survive an attack that many experts thought would defeat it in day, for almost two years. This project is an ongoing collection of stories of Ukrainians in love, documenting how the power of love has sustained them to be braver, stronger, safer, and refuse to be embittered or beaten by terror. From Viktor and Luba, married for 70 years and now both in their 90’s, who survived a direct rocket attack on their home this year in Donbas, and still smile for their portrait as the war encroaches all around them, to Anastasia and Yevgen, a fighter and medic who fell in love on the front lines in Bakhmut, to Andrii and Alina, whose love has sustained them after Andrii lost his hands and eyes while defending in the east, and now must join the thousands of Ukrainians rebuilding a life forever altered by their injuries, these photographs are tributes to the bonds and emotions that have kindled the fire of Ukrainian resistance against all odds.
Ukrainian Love Letters is an ongoing series of portraits of the power of love during throughout this brutal invasion. It is my hope that this framework will allow viewers all over the world to gain a deeper understanding personal nature of this war beyond statistics about numbers of refugees, casualties, and strategic moves by world leaders. This project aims to create a sense of empathy comprehension of the experience of Ukrainians through images the world can not look away from, not of violence, but of the bonds and families that Ukraine is fighting for.
Natalie Keyssar biography
Natalie Keyssar is a documentary photographer based in Brooklyn, New York.
After receiving a BFA in Painting from the Pratt Institute in 2009, she pursued photojournalism, which fused her love for light and color with her fascination with current events, stories of social change and the way individuals are effected by power structures.
Much of her personal work has focused on the themes of inequality, migration, youth culture and the personal effects of political turmoil and violence.
Natalie’s work has been published by Time, The New York Times Magazine, Bloomberg Business Week, California Sunday Magazine, Le Monde M, and Zeit, among many others, and awarded by organizations like the Philip Jones Griffith Award, The Aaron Siskind Foundation, PDN 30, Magenta Flash Forward, American Photography, Reportage by Getty Images, The NPPA, and VSCO. She has taught New Media at the International Center of Photography in New York and has instructed at various workshops across the US and Latin America with organizations such as Foundry, Women Photograph, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the IWMF and International Photography Festival of Puebla, Mexico. She is a Pulitzer Center Grantee, the winner of the 2018 ICP Infinity Emerging Photographer award and a winner of the 2023 Aperture Creator Labs fund.