Episode 88: Anastasia Taylor-Lind & Alisa Sopova (Conflict Photography)

courtesy of ATL and AS

Today’s guests work together in Ukraine, exploring the impact of war on the daily life of civilians, as well as combatants.  Together they join poetry, anthropology, photography and journalism to study the people of Ukraine and explore the long-term impacts of war in the nation.

Anastasia Taylor-Lind, an award-winning English/Swedish photojournalist, focuses her work on women, population, and war in many editorial publications worldwide. She holds degrees in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales Newport (BA) and the London College of Communication (MA). She additionally studied at Harvard University, where she became a Nieman Fellow, researching war and how to tell stories of modern conflict. She has contributed to numerous publications such as National Geographic, TIME, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Guardian, and more. Commercial clients include Dove, Wellesley College, P&G, and Always. Her work has also been in many significant international exhibits such as The Saatchi Gallery, The Frontline Club, The National Portrait Gallery in London, SIDE Gallery in Newcastle, Fotografiska and Fovea Exhibitions in New York, Pikto Gallery in Toronto, and The New Mexico Museum of Modern Art in Santa Fe. Check out her GOST published book, MAIDAN – Portraits from the Black Square which is her log of the Ukrainian uprising in Kiev, and One Language her exploration of the damage of war through her poetry and photos.

Alisa Sopova is a Ukrainian journalist whose work has focused on war in Ukraine since it began in 2014. She is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Princeton University working on civilian lives during the war in Ukraine, from 2014 to the present. Focusing on affect, materiality, and embodied experiences of war, she seeks to recognize personal, everyday aspects of living with military violence, beyond highly ideological images of civilian populations produced by political and humanitarian actors that dominate the public discourse on war.  She captured the story in the Donbas region (eastern Ukraine) of everyday life in a community embroiled in military conflict. She is a journalist with a BA from Moscow State and an MA from Harvard University, and studies in anthropology led her to seek her PhD.  She reports on  daily life in the context of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.  Check out her work in various publications: Anxious Suitcases and Their Contents, Be Strong Like a Kitchen Cabinet, Visuals and the Invisible in the Forgotten, and The Death Collectors. Check out her instagram for more information on #5Kfromthefrontline project.

Check out their amazing exhibit at Harvard University until February 25th, 2024.

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