To Be Who We Want To Be is a long-term photographic project about queer people in Ukraine. It comes from a desire to document a social world that feels important to me, while resisting the visual clichés and media expectations through which queer life is often represented. I photograph queer people as singular individuals rather than symbols of a category. Some may look visibly queer, some not at all. Their queerness exists, but it does not always define how they are seen. The project is interested in lives that resist easy reading or fixed definitions. It documents a generation of queer Ukrainians living through a particular moment shaped by post-Soviet inheritance, war, intimacy, survival, and everyday life. I want the work to respond to a simple question: What does queer life in Ukraine actually look and feel like when we stop expecting it to look a certain way?
TBWWWTB was shortlisted for Palm Photo Prize (2022); was exhibited at Melkweg, Amsterdam (2023); Australia Photo, Melbourne (2024); and recently at Schwules Museum, Berlin (2026).