By Nikoletta Stoyanova, recipient of the Ian Parry Photojournalism Grant in 2023
An international competition for photographers aged 24 or under, the Ian Parry Photojournalism
Grant is awarded to a project that addresses an important issue related to the human condition. In 2023, the recipient was Nikoletta Stoyanova from Donetsk in Ukraine. Her portfolio of images included this one of police checking a man’s military papers during a break in Odesa.
Having grown up in a family that passed a photographic tradition down through the generations, Stoyanova took up the medium when she was 15 and enrolled on a photojournalism degree when she was 17. Working as a photojournalist in the Odesa region when the Russian invasion began in 2022, Stoyanova resolved to stay and document everything that happened.
Media outlets wouldn’t let her work on the front line, so Stoyanova became a ‘fixer’, helping journalists and filmmakers on the ground, searching for places to report from, subjects to cover when they got there and people to feature in their reports. An aspect of this role involved taking photos to give to news reporters as story leads, and Stoyanova started selling her pictures to an agency, becoming a front-line photojournalist in the Donbas region.
For this image, though, Stoyanova turned her lens on a couple enjoying a weekend break in the Black Sea port city of Odesa. The man is having his military papers checked by the police. “It’s not so much that the foreign viewer has become tired of images of graves, of dead, emaciated children, of e
