Styrannya

In March 2022, as Mariupol faced relentless destruction, I witnessed a haunting transformation on my social media feed. Once-ordinary family snapshots—fragments of everyday life—gave way to desperate pleas for help, as friends and relatives searched for their missing loved ones. In the relentless churn of digital media, where stories—whether mundane or tragic—are rapidly consumed and discarded, these images risked being lost to the endless scroll. Styrannya is a visual act of defiance against this digital oblivion, an attempt to reclaim these photographs from ephemerality and restore them with permanence and weight.

Missing persons notices are not new, but seeing them emerge in real time from an active war zone—interspersed with the trivialities of daily life—was deeply unsettling. While the world continued to scroll, Mariupol was vanishing. Residential buildings collapsed into dust, shopping malls stood in skeletal ruins, entire streets were erased.

The Ukrainian word styrannya translates to both erasure and attrition—a dual meaning that reflects both the physical destruction of a city and the digital disappearance of its victims. This series removes images of the missing from the fleeting space of the screen and transforms them into physical objects. Each portrait, re-exposed from a phone screen onto photographic paper in the darkroom, becomes fixed in silver grains—its surface altered by the chemical process, echoing the fragility of memory and the violation of loss. These prints take up space. They cannot be deleted.

Styrannya compels the viewer to not only confront the fate of each individual but also to examine how we engage with images of war, loss, and suffering. In an age where endless information numbs our perception, this work asks: How do we bear witness in a world that forgets so easily?