Originally published 2022-06-25.
In the spring of 2022, Ukrainian photographer Stanislav Senyk photographed about forty graduating school students in Chernihiv, a city in northern Ukraine that had just survived a five-week Russian siege. Instead of a school hall or a park, the students posed in their graduation sashes among bombed buildings, burnt-out cars and wrecked tanks. Senyk's goal was simple: to keep a record that these young people could one day show their own children.
The images spread quickly through Ukrainian and international media in June 2022, including a Reuters photo story and a feature on My Modern Met. They remain some of the most striking portraits of what the first months of the full-scale war meant for ordinary teenagers.
From weddings to wartime
Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Senyk mostly photographed weddings, engagements and family celebrations. Once the war began, his work turned to documenting how people around him were living through it.
The graduation series sits between those two worlds. It borrows the familiar language of a celebration portrait, with smiles, ribbons, and friends posed in a group, but places it in a setting that makes the viewer stop. That contrast is what gives the pictures their power.
What Chernihiv went through
Chernihiv lies roughly 150 kilometres north of Kyiv, close to the borders with Belarus and Russia. Russian forces surrounded it from the first day of the invasion. For weeks the city was shelled and bombed, much as other Ukrainian cities were in those months, as drone footage from Mariupol also showed.
The city's mayor, Vladyslav Atroshenko, estimated that 350 to 400 civilians were killed during the siege; the full toll is not known. Landmarks including the Hotel Ukraine and buildings of the Chernihiv Polytechnic National University were destroyed, and the road bridge over the Desna river was knocked out. Russian troops withdrew at the beginning of April, and Ukrainian officials declared the region free of them by 4–5 April 2022.
So when the students posed for Senyk a couple of months later, the damage around them was fresh.
The photographs
The students wore their graduation sashes. Some stood on top of a disabled tank, its reflection mirrored in a puddle. Others walked through blackened rooms of a burned-out building, lit only by a doorway. Some posed beside rusted car wrecks; one student sat inside a tank.
Senyk told reporters that the students were disappointed to lose their graduation ceremony and prom, but that what they had lived through had made them stronger. In the portraits you can see that mix: some faces are serious, some smile, and many look straight at the camera.
The series is shared below through the Instagram posts of outlets and photographers who published it.
A post shared by Il Messaggero (@ilmessaggero.it)
The Italian daily Il Messaggero shared the Chernihiv graduation portraits with its readers in June 2022.
(The Instagram post originally embedded here is no longer available.)
A post shared by The Village Україна (@thevillageua)
The Ukrainian magazine The Village Ukraine published the series for a home audience that had followed the siege closely.
A post shared by Taras Ambroz (@t.ambroz)
A post shared by Ukrainian user Taras Ambroz, one of many people who reposted the images.
A post shared by Эхо Кавказа (@ekho_kavkaza)
Ekho Kavkaza, a Russian-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, also shared the photographs.
A post shared by Чернигов Post | Чернігів Post (@chernihiv.post)
The local news page Chernihiv Post shared the portraits of the city's own graduates.
Why Senyk made them
Senyk was clear about his purpose. "The main idea of this photoshoot is to save the history for these students," he told My Modern Met. He imagined the graduates years from now showing the photos to their own children, to explain what happened to their city.
He also framed the series as a warning. "We must remember what Russia did in Ukraine in order to never allow this to happen again," he said.
That intention matters for how we look at the photos. They are not staged disaster scenes or fashion shoots. They are a deliberate record of a specific group of young people at a specific moment, made with their participation, in the ruins of their own city.
How to look at war photography with care
Portraits like these can be read too quickly, as a simple story of resilience. A few things are worth keeping in mind:
- Composure is not the absence of grief. A student smiling for a graduation photo may still have lost friends, relatives or a home.
- Hardship is not a gift. Saying that war made young people stronger is the photographer's observation about these students, not a reason to see suffering as useful.
- Context keeps the record honest. Names, dates and places turn a striking image into evidence. Sharing the photographer's name and the city helps keep that context attached.
A milestone that still happened
The end of school is one of the few rites of passage almost everyone shares. These students reached it in a year when much of their world was broken around them. Senyk's portraits do not hide the damage, but they also refuse to let it erase the milestone. That is why they are still worth seeing.
Sources: My Modern Met (June 2022); Reuters picture story; Siege of Chernihiv (Wikipedia). Photos: Stanislav Senyk.
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