Within the framework of the FotoEvidence Ukraine initiative, the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPP) published a photobook by Serhiy Korovaynyi “Donbas, the Land of Hell and Love”— a personal story about a home that no longer exists and a love of land that cannot be erased from memory.
Serhiy is originally from Khartsyzsk. In this book, he redefines what it means to lose a native place—and how to continue to love it, even when it is occupied and destroyed. The publication covers the years 2000—2025, showing Donbas as a lasting daily experience: about memory, trauma, humanity and a region that has changed forever.
The book includes more than a hundred photographs. The author deliberately focuses on photographs — without unnecessary formal effects, with vertical publication logic and signatures (place/date) inserted at the end, so that nothing interrupts the internal rhythm of the story. It is a book about war and war crimes, but at the same time — about human life, in which warmth and tenderness exist alongside darkness. Symbol of this ambivalence was the cover: a photo from a trip to a position where the stars shine above the darkness, and below — the cold view of the thermal imager.
Photo editors Irinka Gromotska and Danylo Pavlov worked on the selection of photographs, and the American photo editor Sarah Leen helped to strengthen the selection — cutting the material so that the book was shorter but stronger.
On February 3, PEN Ukraine hosted a presentation of the photo book and a conversation about the long journey of its creation and why photodocumentary remains one of the key ways to preserve history and understand the present.
The publication was implemented with the support of the Open Society Foundations and the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework of the FotoEvidence Ukraine initiative.
