CAPTURING CONFLICT: Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Alisa Sopova and Greg Brockett in conversation

4th May 2023

Taken during her time in Ukraine between 2014 and June 2022, Anastasia Taylor-Lind’s powerful photographs document the devastating reality of living amidst the war Here photographer Anastasia Taylor-Lind and writer Alisa Sopova talk about their long-term collaboration and how together they’ve documented the devastating reality of living amidst conflict and war in Ukraine. Curator Greg Brockett joins the discussion to share his own reaction and learnings to Anastasia’s work while putting together the current exhibition Ukraine: Photographs from the Frontline.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind is an English-Swedish photojournalist who has contributed to National Geographic Magazine and other leading editorial publications. She is also an author, poet, TED Fellow, and 2016 Harvard Nieman Fellow. For the last nine years, Taylor-Lind has worked in Ukraine covering issues relating to women, war, and violence. Her first book, MAIDAN – Portraits from the Black Square, documents the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution and was published by GOST Books the same year. Her poetry focuses on contemporary conflicts and the experiences she cannot photograph. In 2022, her first collection, One Language, was published in the UK by Smith|Doorstop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alisa Sopova is an independent journalist and a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Princeton University. Her reporting and research both focus on civilian experiences of the war in Ukraine. Born and raised in Donetsk, Alisa lived through military violence, displacement and Russian occupation already during the first phase of the war which started in 2014. Since then, she devoted her career to exploring the means of storytelling that allow to convey the everyday, true-to-life experiences of war and minimize the aesthetic cliches, political biases and stereotypes that traditionally distort such narratives. Alisa’s reporting from Ukraine has been featured, among others, in The New York Times, TIME magazine, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NPR. Her research articles were published in leading anthropological journals, such as American Ethnologist. In collaboration with Anastasia Taylor-Lind, Alisa is the co-author of the #5Kfromthefrontline project about daily life during the war.

 

 

 

 

 

Greg Brockett is a photography curator with the Contemporary Conflict team at Imperial War Museums and most recently curated the ‘Ukraine: photographs from the frontline’ exhibition. He is Co-Investigator on an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project based on the archive of photojournalist Tim Hetherington and is co-supervising a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) in collaboration with King’s College London. He is currently leading on the museums collecting around photojournalism and the war in Ukraine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Max Houghton is a writer, curator and editor working with the photographic image as it intersects with politics, law and human rights. She writes regularly for the international arts press, as well as for museum and monograph publications. She runs the MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where she is co-founder of interdisciplinary research hub Visible Justice. Her doctoral research at UCL examines the role of the image in creating international criminal law.