Within the FotoEvidence Ukraine (UAPP × FotoEvidence) initiative, the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPP) has published a photobook by Liza Bukreieva titled “Here, Houses Are Built from Ashes” — an intimate yet at the same time boundlessly expansive story about the everyday lives of civilians in de‑occupied and frontline communities. It is a book about routine, where logic sometimes disappears but human dignity remains. About destroyed places that may appear almost ordinary if one does not look closely. Yet the moment your gaze lingers, cracks begin to show: fear, pain, stubbornness, hope.
At the center of the project is an attempt to answer a question that sounds almost unbearably simple: why do people stay in places where infrastructure has been destroyed, basic living conditions are lacking, and danger is a daily reality?
“Here, Houses Are Built from Ashes” is not only about survival. It is about a right: the right to remain on one’s own land despite destruction; to decide where to live — and even where to die. It is about inner strength that does not always have loud words, but manifests itself in the simplest things — in presence, in resistance to everyday life, in the refusal to give one’s home over to war entirely.
Visually, the book is constructed in two parts that reinforce one another. The first consists of portraits and fragments of everyday life — attentive, unhurried images that do not rush to “explain,” but instead hold the viewer on details and gestures. The second part is landscapes: a broader context, the environment as part of the story — often overlooked, yet precisely what shapes the sense of time, loss, and change.
The photographs are accompanied by short notes — without instructions and without moralizing. This book leaves space for silence and for the reader’s own interpretation, because life under such conditions is always multilayered, contradictory, and too human to be reduced to a single conclusion.
On March 17, 2026, the PEN Ukraine space will host a presentation of the photobook and a conversation about the long path of its creation — and about why documentary photography as an authorial statement remains one of the key ways to preserve history and reflect on the present.
The publication was produced with the support of the Open Society Foundations and the International Renaissance Foundation as part of the FotoEvidence Ukraine initiative.
