Womb

• Prize
  Silver in Editorial/Conflict
• Photographer
  Alena Grom
• Photo Date
  june 2018

Photographs about life during the war. The project was created by a photo artist in 2018 on the front-line territory of Donbass. A Ukrainian photographer from Donbass, Alena Grom, shows life despite the odds. The pictures are based around the stories of women who decided to give birth to a child while living in a war zone. The photo artist builds her work on medical parallels where soil and shelter take the literal form of a picture of an ultrasound of an abdomen. Residents of mining towns are an intrauterine fetus that develops and lives a full life, but in full dependence on its mother.

Ukrainian artist and documentary photographer Alena Grom was born in Donetsk. In April 2014, she was forced to leave her hometown due to the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Since 2017, she has lived in Bucha near Kyiv. After Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022, Grom and her family became refugees twice but returned after Bucha was de-occupied. Her experiences deeply influence her work, which captures the resilience of life amid war, focusing on victims, migrants, and refugees, at the intersection of social reporting and conceptual photography.