George Ivanchenko
photographer
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- Research topic:
- Warchive
photographer
Ukrainian photographer who has been working as a freelance documentary and journalistic photographer since February 2022. From the first months of the full-scale invasion, he began shooting for the Associated Press and the European Pressphoto Agency as an independent photographer. For a year and a half, Heorhiy was forced to leave his permanent residence to document the war.
The turning point in his photography was the almost month he spent in Bakhmut, which was stormed daily by Russian troops with the Wagner group. In December and January 2022, he documented the lives of local residents with a backpack and a sleeping bag, living with residents in basements, the military, and rescuers. In April, while working on a story about Chasiv Yar in Donetsk region, his car was shelled and destroyed by a Russian shell. Subsequently, Heorhiy began to write reports as well, and collaborated with the Kyiv Independent, Libération, Dagbladet Information, Babel, Reporters, and other media outlets. He continues to document the stories of people on the front line and in the de-occupied territories, while working on his own authorial projects.
In 2023, he received his first award — 25 Under 25: "Young and Daring", and became a member of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPP). Finalist / Commended — Ian Parry Grant 2024, in September 2024 he won first place for the "Warhole" series at the MIPH PHOTO PRIZE 2024 competition.
As part of the LivArch Fellowship at the Center for Urban History, Heorhii will work on the Warchive project, which aims to preserve memory by creating a physical and digital archive of found photographs from bombed-out residential buildings in Izium and North Saltivka in Kharkiv. Together with Nikita Kuznetsov, they explore abandoned apartments in high-rise buildings destroyed by air strikes and shelling, collecting films, printed photos, Polaroids, family, army, and school albums-anything that preserves personal history. The goal of the project is to preserve fragments of memory and organize the physical and digital archive.