“Do you hear the birds outside, singing? It is beautiful”, I hear Yevhen saying. He looks at me from the hospital bed he is lying on. Yevhen is thin, pale, and nothing like the beefy young guy on his social media profile picture. He is a Ukrainian army soldier, and two days after turning twenty-one he stepped on an anti-personnel land mine in East Ukraine. It severely injured his legs and caused damage to his internal organs. He wears a colostomy bag, and will be able to start walking only in three months.

Life after Injury is a photography project about young Ukrainian soldiers who were wounded during the ongoing war with Russia-backed rebels and Russian regular army in the Donbass region. Since May 2014 this conflict has taken over nine thousand lives. More than three thousand Ukrainian soldiers were killed, almost eleven thousand were injured. Just as the Afghanistan war veterans thirty years ago, they face a lack of physical and psychosocial rehabilitation programs.

I concentrate on their adaptation to peaceful life when they come home, a story that gets little coverage in media outlets and existing photography projects. At home they have to face an important challenge. They have to resocialize, as now they are different people with painful memories impossible to forget. They have to overcome many difficulties and seek possibilities themselves or with the support from their close relatives, friends, volunteers and psychologists.

The Ukrainian government often neglects the contribution of these men. There are cases when war veterans’ documents would read that they were wounded during a military training. To get regular compensations they have to go through a special medical commission that would prove that they were injured during battle. No rehabilitation facilities that could potentially help Ukrainian soldiers deal with both physical and psychological trauma are built. Ukrainian war veterans have to reach out to special programs that would send them abroad for injury treatment or physical rehabilitation.

Despite the Minsk agreements that state a ceasefire, dozens of Ukrainian soldiers get injured every week. Some of them go back to the war zone, even on prosthetic legs. Some become volunteers and gather supplies for the army unit they served in, or simply find sense in peaceful life again. Stories you see in this exhibition are, without doubt, narratives of overcoming physical and mental trauma. I hope they can serve not only as a piece of visual history, but as a therapy for war veterans on the brink of losing faith in life after injury.

About artist

Oleksii Furman is a Ukrainian freelance photojournalist currently pursuing his Master’s degree at Missouri School of Journalism on a Fulbright scholarship. He has been working on photo stories and photography projects since 2011. In 2013 he became a frequent contributor to Ukrainian’s local edition of National Geographic Magazine.

When Ukrainian revolution started, he was deeply involved in the coverage, and then moved to Crimea and East Ukraine to continue photographing the ongoing conflict for various international outlets.

Alexey’s work has been recognized by POYi, NPPA, PDN Photo Annual, CPOY and Kuala Lumpur Photo Awards. He was the recipient of the Bayeux-Calvados Award for War Correspondents in 2014 in the “Young Reporter” category and is an Eddie Adams Workshop and Missouri Photo Workshop alumni.

His pictures have been published in TIME, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Al Jazeera America, 6MOIS, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, De Standaard, Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, The Independent, FAZ, SZ, El Pais, De Volkskrant.

In September 2015 Oleksii Furman was picked by Getty Images Reportage agency as an Emerging Talent photographer.

 Life after Injury photography project has received Grand Prize of the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award and Grand Prize of the International Photo Exhibition of the “Day” newspaper.