The Me Before The War No Longer Exists: Ukrainian Portraits is a participatory photographic project bearing witness to Ukrainians displaced by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Developed in collaboration with a community of displaced Ukrainian women, the project creates a space where photographs emerge through dialogue, trust, and shared making. It preserves personal and collective histories while honoring each participant’s experience. As a Ukrainian artist, I approach this work from within a community shaped by the ongoing war. While my experience differs from those of the women I collaborate with, our conversations emerge from shared histories, cultural memory, and an ongoing relationship to the invasion. The project connects women across generations, from young mothers and teenage girls on the cusp of adulthood to middle-aged women rebuilding their lives under radically changed circumstances. Their experiences do not form a single narrative. Instead, they show the many ways displacement, memory, and identity continue to shape everyday life. The project resists traditional photojournalism by positioning collaborators as co-creators and its primary audience, blurring the boundaries between subject, author, and viewer. The photographs are not made to illustrate fixed ideas about displacement but emerge through conversation, trust, and the shared act of making. In this way, the process becomes a way of understanding how memory, belonging, identity, and survival are shaped and continually unfold. The project brings together photographs made over the past three years with displaced Ukrainians across the United States and Europe since the 2022 invasion, which remains ongoing. As it continues to evolve, it becomes an expanding archive of personal and collective histories, carrying these experiences forward. The photographs combine the historic wet plate collodion process with contemporary digital tools. The slow, tactile nature of wet plate photography resists complete control and reflects the uncertainty that shapes the lives it engages. Each session develops through conversation about belonging and transition. I prioritize emergent collaboration and a responsive process, centering the act of image-making. The photographs remain open to what unfolds between us. The resulting images hold identity as something lived, relational, and continually unfolding rather than fixed or singular.