Dima Gavrysh | Inshallah

Dima’s images unfold in front of us like hazy moments of a dream. The photographs feel inexplicably familiar and intimate, yet they linger like unfinished sentences. These scenes appear mostly blurry, in mid-motion with glimmers of sharp focus. It is focus that brings no clarity. Each image is like a frame in a reel that has come to a sudden stop, and we are suspended in a moment where the graceful and the hideous embrace.

Dima borrows from the veiled visual language that we encounter in sleep. This is a contradictory world, one where all is soaked in shadow or is blindingly bright. Here there is beauty in the grit, a stillness amidst the chaos, and poetry embedded in horrific reality. In his photographs, we feel as if we could touch the air or even taste it, it is so infused with dust, atmosphere and light.

In visually representing the war, Dima moved from working with direct reportage to a more emotional presentation of his experiences. Eventually, his work evolved into these abstracted images that reflect the complicated fog of war. The resulting photographs are personal and haunting, and in their obscurity, they tell a different kind of truth.

- Mia + Lisa

View the series here.

Suspected Taliban fighters are being detained during the joined patrol by the US Army and the Afghan National Army in Kowst province of Afghanistan.

Sweat-soaked shirts of the US soldiers dry on the rocks during a three day patrol in Paktika province of Afghanistan.

Captain Andrew Harris from Cincinnati, Ohio, Commander of the combat outpost Tangi, prepares to board a helicopter to take him to the funeral of one of his soldiers, killed the previous night by an IED in the Wardak province of Afghanistan.

A bird sits on the hand of a US Soldier during a break in the air-assault mission in Kandahar province of Afghanistan.

Sandbags fill the gap in a blast wall at the Forward Operating Base Pasab in Kandahar province of Afghanistan.

US soldiers take a break during the three day patrol in Paktika province of Afghanistan.

A US Soldier changes after returning from patrol at the Forward Operating Base Pasab in Kandahar province of Afghanistan.