PHOTO GALLERY: Striking Prague exhibition shows Ukrainians sheltering in metro

It’s your last chance to see photos in Prague’s metro stops highlighting the plight of people in Ukraine. The exhibition called Next Station: Ukraine runs until May 15 at the Muzeum, Můstek, and Anděl stops.

Exhibiting the photos in the metro is fitting since they depict people taking refuge in metro stations in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Due to their location underground, the stations have been the safest place to avoid bombardment from Russian forces since the invasion of Ukraine.

The pictures are displayed in spaces normally used for advertising, which gives them a surreal quality. The stark images are not what people passing by expect to see on their commute. Normally, people in advertisements are unnaturally happy and depicted in idealized spaces.

“It is not a campaign, it is our attempt to find another medium for journalism and documentary photography. In these pictures Prague's local residents and tourists see ordinary Ukrainian people hiding inside stations, trying to maintain their everyday life there,” the journalism network n-ost said in a press release.

The use of the Anděl station adds another layer of meaning, as before the Velvet Revolution the station was called Moskevská and it was meant to symbolize friendship between Moscow and Prague.

The photos were taken by Ukrainian photographers Maxim Dondyuk, Pavel Dorogoy, Julia Kochetova, Serhii Korovayny, and Slava Ratynski. The captions on the photos are in Czech, but the meanings are quite clear even without translation. Similar pictures with captions in German were previously displayed in Berlin’s metro system.

The people photographed in Ukraine often closely resemble passersby in Prague, and the stations themselves are very similar, as the photos below can reveal. The photo of the couple huddled and looking at a phone was taken in December 2022, the photo of the two senior citizens was taken in February 2022, and the woman in a tent is from March 2022.

A reflection of two children on scooters in the glass of the Můstek metro stop appears next to a picture of children in Ukraine taken in March 2022.

This image from the Anděl metro stop of a despondent woman sitting on a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket in Kharkiv was taken in May 2022.

Most people pass by the photos without stopping to look. The photo below, taken in December 2022, is in a corridor at Můstek between metro lines A and B.

People huddle on the stairs of a metro stop in Kyiv on the first day of the invasion in February 2022. The poster is at the Můstek station, at the entry to the B line from the A line.