Documenting her journey from Ukraine to the Netherlands with her mother, Hanna Hrabarska’s visual diary grapples with the experience of being forced to leave one’s home in the face of war—and the challenges of arriving in a new country.

In the course of just one week in a fateful late winter last year, photographer Hanna Hrabarska had to abandon her apartment, her photography studio and her childhood home. A horrific reality shared by the many Ukrainians who have been forced to flee their homes following Russia’s full-scale invasion on the 24th of February 2022, Hrabarska and her mother embarked on a journey from her native town of Kryvyi Rih to Uzhgorod, Mali Selmentsi, Kosice, Budapest and Munich, finally arriving in the Netherlands as war refugees.

Finding herself face-to-face with a new home and a new identity, Hrabarska picked up her camera on the first morning of her odyssey. My Mom Wants To Go Back Home Is a moving documentary diary that charts the journey through the lens of her mother’s experience. The images born of this year of uncertainty—sometimes somber, sometimes humorous, always tender—grapple with uprooting and rerooting, focusing not only on leaving one’s home but also on what happens when we arrive somewhere else.

Sophie Wright, for LensCulture