Monographs

The Silent Migration

2026

May. Ukraine. Mikolaiv. The young are live wire. Names: Mira. Back in Mexico, it means “to see.” Here: Peace. To come of age in a war zone while trembling with life in direct periphery to death. Where peace is seen between death like clockwork. And the siren blares again. And no one flinches.

I am only one of countless photographers who have sat in this Ukrainian hotel lobby waiting on a fixer with a sore back and a persistent sense of uncertainty, grasping at ghosts of motivations floating about the back of a scattered, underslept mind.

The "boom" of mortars is a sensory shock that stays in your bones, especially when contrasted with the sterile, futuristic drone of a fleet of Iranian Shaheds. In a moment's time, one can witness the entire lifecycle of this conflict: the high-tech sensors of a robotic arm and the "dumb" iron of a mortar shell smacking the earth. The "mind-machine" disconnect of seeing amputees control robotic limbs with their thoughts while struggling to control your own racing mind is a jarring irony. The cognitive dissonance is the struggle to make a machine move, with that to make the mind quiet and still. It’s no wonder I feel "weird" and "sub-par"—I am watching humans be rebuilt while I feel like I'm being worn down by the scent of coal and diesel. The bar of usability for the work I am creating, I can see the "connective tissue" of war. However, I worry I have missed the heart of the story, as my own heart never drops below 110 beats per minute between and beneath the sky-scorching roar of missiles flying overhead, a sound more akin to God tearing open the heavens than to the inevitable hell that reigns down upon this land and its people.

I can hear children playing outside even though it's late and half past dark. Everything sounds so normal that one might almost forget the war. I hope the air-raid sirens stay silent for now, as I'm certain the kids have been instructed to flee inside the second they sound.

But for this brief moment of normalcy, of sanity, these kids will never know how much the echo of their laughter and the sound of shoes chasing one another across the pavement four stories below ease the city streets. As for the tension in my chest, the only thump I hear is a basketball, and the roar of a distant motorcyclist taking in the cool spring breeze.

Everything sounds so damn normal on this beautiful evening in Dnipro City. So normal that I fear my own words, and I shall cut them short. To forget is to lose sight of the truth — a truth so distant from an entire waking world, far beyond the western horizon. As for the eastern front, chaos twiddles its thumbs, waiting for the moment, the very moment it believes the war has gone forgotten just long enough.

Project is ongoing…