The Me Before The War No Longer Exists: Ukrainian Portraits is a participatory arts project using a historic photographic process to create a visual archive that bears witness to the Ukrainians displaced by war.  The goal of the project is to engage the community in creation of artifacts and facilitate an artistic experience, where the participants feel visible, valued, and their stories preserved. The project allows a way for the participants to shape their own representations and to encourage a dialogue between past and present. The tintype, or wet plate collodion, process makes exposures on metal plates coated with wet silver nitrate. Like a Polaroid, each exposure produces a single image; a single tintype takes about 15 minutes to create, the forced slowness of the process revealing the internal stories in the final portraits.

The portraits in this section were made in Germany, in the summer of 2023, and feature communities of displaced Ukrainians in Stuttgart, Augsburg, and Berlin.

This project has been make possible with the support by Rubys Artist Grant and Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Travel Prize.