A Field Guide to Away from Home

When conflict takes you away

Field Guide Vol. 236

In this week’s Field Guide, we consider how conflicts can separate people from their homes and the journeys that displaced people take both geographically and emotionally. We begin with a look at those who have lost homes due to the conflict in Ukraine and consider how we think about home and what we leave behind.

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The Impossible Dilemma

Made possible by the Pulitzer Center

By Misha Friedman

The photographer Misha Friedman went to Ukraine this year with a pressing question on his mind: What does it mean to have to choose between what's best for your country and what's best for your family? Friedman interviewed and photographed Ukrainian families who were forced to leave their country due to the Russian invasion. He then juxtaposed these portraits with images from the land they left behind. Yet, underlying all of these images is the realization that the country left behind no longer exists as it once did.

LEFT: Tatiana was a very successful radio DJ in Odesa. When the war started her boyfriend was killed when his car hit a mine. She now lives in Madrid with her two teenage sons. Her sons are doing well with the transition but Tatiana is struggling to reinvent herself, learn Spanish and raise two kids in a new country as a single mom. RIGHT: A Russian rocket hit a residential neighborhood in Uman in the middle of the night. This photo was taken on the day of the attack, which left 25 dead.

LEFT: The wall of a school in Kharkiv that was shelled. RIGHT: Natasha has had to flee her home twice. In 2014, she was forced to leave Crimea for Kyiv and then again in 2022, she fled from Kyiv to England. She now lives in Reading just outside of London. Natasha is a single mother of two and was a successful small business owner in Ukraine but finds it is nearly impossible to recreate what she had built in Ukraine.