Photojournalist Paula Bronstein has spent much of her career documenting the victims of forgotten wars, beginning with the more than 15 years she spent photographing families trapped in the endless turmoil of post-9/11 Afghanistan to more recently the heartbreaking plight of the Rohingya refugees caught in a constant and violent shuffle between Myanmar and Bangladesh.
“I look for the people that nobody knows, the people that are off the front pages after 24 hours, because the bomb goes off, the suicide bomber strikes somewhere else, and the attention shifts,” she said. “But there are always people left behind, whose lives are shattered and they have to deal with the aftermath. No one cares, no one cares who they are, but I do.”
In her latest project, Bronstein, a Massachusetts-born photographer now based in Asia, went behind the frontlines of the unrelenting war in Ukraine, largely absent from the headlines but raging nonstop since 2014, where she turned her lens on the plight of the elderly, scores of whom are cut off from society because of a battleground that is constantly shifting and where average Ukrainians are caught in the middle.
