How a Family Journey to Ukraine Ended in the Documentation of War

Written in collaboration with Ford.

In February of 2013, photographer Chris Nunn set off for Ukraine in an attempt to learn more about his grandmother's roots. Knowing nobody there, and speaking no Ukrainian or Russian, he had little idea about what he might find. But the small city of Kulash – and soon the wider country and people – captured his imagination, and over the subsequent three years Chris made frequent trips to Ukraine from his home in Yorkshire.

A year later, war broke out in Ukraine and Chris found himself thrown, unwittingly, into the role of war photographer. But rather than immersing himself in the thick of the conflict, Chris chose to document the other, lesser-seen domestic side of war. The result is an ongoing series of intimate portraits and photos that reveal another aspect of life in a country thrown into conflict.

Below are some words from Chris.

My grandmother had a long battle with Alzheimer's, and towards the end of her life I decided to make a trip to western Ukraine – the place she'd grown up. She'd left when she was about 14, at the beginning of WWII, and went to Germany, where she worked on farms, before coming to England as a displaced person in 1945. She married a Yorkshireman and never went back.

My grandmother always seemed to have a difficult relationship with, and idea about, her motherland. Sometimes it seemed as though she hated it, and other times it seemed like she really missed "home". There was always a lot of mystery surrounding her life there; there are different versions of the story about why she left, and questions about why she didn't have the same surnames as the rest of her family. We think she was probably either born from an affair or out of marriage.

When I first said I was going to Ukraine she was rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer's. I could see she was becoming more ill, and forgetting more, and so I started thinking about making the trip. It's hard to tell what she really understood about it, but I remember her being quite angry at one point. She didn't really have a very good life there.

In February of 2013 I visited Kalush, a small city in western Ukraine, and went to the village where she was born, which she'd talked about at various points in her life. I took a few pictures and showed her, but she didn't recognise anything; it was too late by then. I went to Kalush without a real plan. I contacted a guy via the internet – another photographer called Andy – who lived near there, and we met for a couple of days and looked around some old industrial sites – old Soviet factories and things like that – that I was quite interested in at the time. After that I just walked around on my own, but before Andy left he wrote a note on a piece of paper in Ukrainian explaining who I was, which I could show to people I met if I wanted to photograph them. A lot of people there had never spoken to a foreigner before and it wasn't the kind of place where you'd see tourists, so a lot of people were surprised and interested to speak to me. I was staying at the only hotel I could find in the area, and the staff there were really friendly. Slowly, I made a few friends and enjoyed being there so just wanted to keep going back. That's how it started, really.

Eventually, during my third trip, I met some distant relatives – people who were related to my grandmother's brother, who died in Siberia under Stalin's rule. I've met them quite a lot since and they've got a son who's just a few years younger than me. We always try to work out how we're related, but it's quite complicated.

Then, six months after my initial trip, the first Euromaidan protest happened. [The Euromaidan protests here refer to the first wave of demonstrations to happen in Kiev which would eventually lead to the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych]. I remember hearing something about it, but nothing was happening yet, especially not in Kalush. The following January I went to Donetsk, which is now the main rebel stronghold of the war, and spent a bit of time there. At the beginning of February I went back to Kalush and things really started escalating. Within a couple of weeks, as it grew more violent in Kiev, the protests spread to Kalush.

It was around that time I photographed a funeral of a guy from Kalush that had been killed in Kiev by a sniper. Seeing that from a small town perspective made it all seem very real. It was really fucking grim: the atmosphere, the anger and hurt, even the weather. After that I went back to Donetsk for a couple of weeks at the beginning of March, and that was the start of the east's rejection of the Euromaidan movement.

We started seeing pro-Russian protests as well as the last big pro-Ukrainian and pro-EU protests as well. After that, pro-Ukrainian activity became impossible and Donetsk slowly became fully under the control of pro-Russian separatists. Over the next 18 months conflict escalated around the areas I was staying, so I tried to respond to it in my work. Traditionally, the iconography of war has been imagery of soldiers, damaged apartment blocks, destruction and the obvious visual effects of war. It's really important to show those things, but it's not everything. If I was a photographer coming to Ukraine now, I could have gone to the hotspots, photographed them and come back with a "war story". But being there, living with regular people, my perspective on it was perhaps different, and I quickly realised that the only thing to do was try to ignore the media frenzy surrounding the war and focus on the way that I saw it, for the most part away from the front lines. I've always been interested in the small stories which are part of a bigger picture, the periphery.

I don't think my Ukrainian friends fully understand what I'm doing, but I think they respect the fact I'm doing it. They know that I'm genuine and that my intentions are good. In the long run I hope what I've done will have some relevance and say some things about a certain period of time. My grandmother was the starting point, the catalyst, for my journey, but I never wanted to make a piece of work about my family history specifically. Nor am I making a definitive story of Ukraine – it's all personal and subjective. It's the places I've been. It's my own little corner of it.