Ukrainian high school students recently posed for a series of poignant graduation photos, juxtaposing their youth and cautious optimism with the horrific devastation of war in their homeland.
Photographer Stanislav Senyk told Reuters he wanted to capture the “very important story” of about 40 students graduating from schools in Chernihiv in northern Ukraine after witnessing the horrors of war there.
“I saw the kids who were there and it was like there was some kind of surrealism going on,” Senyk said.
“I realized at that moment that I could write a very important story about high school students who were graduating and witnessing the war, and it cracked their graduation, their prom, their everything,” he said. “It was very important to capture that memory.”
In one of the photos, a group of students is huddled on top of a tank. Another involves a group of girls in a bombed-out building, while others look down from the gutted floors above.
The students called the experience difficult, but important.
“We wanted to show that we live in such a reality,” Olha Babynets (17) told Reuters. “We wanted to show our pain, it is there and it has never diminished. It was emotionally difficult, but we tried to persevere. And I think we managed to do that.”
In a separate series of photos taken by Abdullah Unver for the Anadolu Agency, Ukrainian students were forced to skip their prom in their dance clothes in the rubble of their bombed school in Kharkov.
KHARKIV, UKRAINE – JUNE 7: A student wearing her prom dress poses for a photo among the ruins of her school destroyed by Russian shelling on June 7, 2022 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Teens in their prom gowns they would have worn staged a graduation ceremony in their devastated school. (Photo by Abdullah Unver/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) (Photo: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
