About
A 21-year-old student with a passion for geopolitics, I went to Ukraine on my own for the first time in my life. My aim: to understand, to meet people, to tell their stories.
The project grew out of a sudden decision: since Europeans could enter Ukraine freely, I had to go. My idea was to cross the country, from Lviv to Kyiv, Irpin, Bucha, Kharkiv, Odesa and Dnipro, to meet soldiers, students, reporters, NGO workers and the director of the Alliance Française in Odesa, and to understand how each of them felt depending on their age, their experience and where they live.
From the trip I brought back more than 600 photos and videos, interviews and a 2,700-word story drawn from my travel journal. This site brings them together.
In my own words
Presenting the project
Hello, my name is Quentin Rozé Pagès. I am French, I study in London, and in the future I hope to become a foreign correspondent and photojournalist.
I made the decision, on a personal initiative, to come to Ukraine to understand for myself the local dynamics and the reality of daily life in wartime.
My main goal is to understand how, after 4 years, the Ukrainian people feel about this conflict, how they are adapting and how they respond to it. I also want to practise taking meaningful photographs in the field and capturing unique images, in order to share a reality that is not that of society in Europe.
In this approach, the themes I would like to explore and bear witness to are everyday life, people’s state of mind and morale, and the way they see the war. I intend to understand this through conversations and exchanges with the population, through photographs and video, and above all through a great deal of observation.
I formally commit to respecting your time, your privacy and your consent. My approach is to gather testimonies and images of the resilience and courage of the Ukrainian people, not to offer a biased, Western view.
Quentin Rozé Pagès, student and aspiring foreign correspondent
My journalistic approach
Independence
I carry out this reporting alone, without a commission from any newsroom. The route, the encounters and the angle are my own choices, deliberate and presented as such.
Sources
My story is based on the travel journal I kept on the ground and on face-to-face interviews. When there was no common language, a translation app served as my interpreter.
Verification
I attribute quotes to the people who said them and present them as testimony. I cross-check the facts, dates and figures cited before publishing them.
Ethics
I present each person for what they say and what they live through, without seeking the sensational. My images show faces, places and traces, with the respect owed to the people who live there.
The author
Quentin Rozé Pagès
Student, 21. Reporter, photographer.
Passionate about geopolitics and the way the world is changing, I see this first trip in the field as my first journalistic experience. My dream: to become a foreign correspondent and cover the conflicts of this world.
Partners and organisations met
No institutional partners for now: the project is open to newsrooms, NGOs and cultural organisations that would like to share it. During the trip, I crossed paths with:
- Voices of Children, a children’s aid NGO, with which I delivered food and clothes to Budy, near Kharkiv.
- The Alliance Française in Odesa, whose director gave me an interview.
- Sky News, through its chief producer in Ukraine, whom I interviewed in Kyiv.