Kristina Yenza is a Ukrainian photographer based in Switzerland, working between fashion, editorial and documentary. YOUNIST’ explores the lives of young people growing up in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Rather than focusing on visible destruction or the material realities of the military offensive, the work investigates the ways that war settles into the background of everyday life, inflecting gestures, relationships, and the way young people see themselves and their future.

YOUNIST’ translates to “youth”—the age where life opens up, identities are sketched out and imaginations soar. Adolescence is a period where profound strength and deep vulnerability can coexist, within the often turbulent transition into adulthood. Yenza’s subjects are aged between 16 and 29—the age she was when she left Ukraine, and the age she was whilst working on the project. In returning to Ukraine from her current base in Switzerland, the project represents a personal journey of familiarity and alienation: through her subjects, Yenza begins to build a picture of the kind of life she might have had. First love, new sensations, doubts and wild dreams, set against the backdrop of attritional war.

The work navigates this tension between proximity and displacement, memory and reality. By avoiding direct representations of violence, the work proposes a quieter reading of conflict: one that is embedded in everyday life, and carried by those who grow up within it. Yenza’s photographs move between portraits and fragments: bodies, spaces, details, and moments that suggest both presence and absence. Through this approach, the project reflects on a generation that continues to live, create, and connect despite ongoing instability. It acknowledges the way that life doesn’t stop, it just becomes more fragile, more intense.