I started taking these pictures at the end of May 2022, just a month after Russian troops were defeated and left Kyiv and the northern regions of Ukraine. 
I was traveling around the region and was shocked by what I saw. I feel that I have to make pictures but didn’t have a clear idea of what to shoot. I’m trying to focus on architecture and details in the style I usually shoot.

Looking through the ground glass of my large format camera, I came across that it is easier to relive the experience of the war, to distance from it. On the ground glass, the experience turned only into a cast of reality, a reproduction of it. So I started using photography as personal therapy.

This work is hope in the conditions of total uncertainty. Trying to hide the pain, fear, and hate, like hiding monuments behind sandbags, or covering broken windows with boards.

“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

Dmytro Prutkin (b. 1986), is a Ukrainian photography-based artist. He calls his practice “field recordings” focusing on place, time, and identity themes.