During the making of his new photo book Wet Ground, British-Iranian artist Aria Shahrokhshahi visited a youth military training camp, just 30km away from the front line of the Ukrainian war. “In the evening, these young lads invited me out to this nightclub where they had dancing podiums and paid dancers. One of them got on the stage, took his jacket off and had a t-shirt that said, ‘big dick is back in town’. For Shahrokhshahi, this moment captured the sense of absurdity that often arises during wartime. “30km away is nothing. You're in range of serious death at that point. It’s just that feeling of: what the fuck is going on?” 

Wet Ground is a collection of photographs taken between 2019 and the present, during which time Shahrokhshahi has spent extensive periods visiting Ukraine and, following the outbreak of the war, working as a humanitarian volunteer. He first visited the country when he was living in Berlin, drawn by its thriving party culture and tattoo scene (many of his friends were tattoo artists). In the years after the 2014 uprising, which led to a change in government, the country was “finding a new identity and really having its moment”. He says, “I went there, made a bunch of friends and totally fell in love with it. I was really fascinated by this new cultural wave that was taking place.”

He returned as a volunteer after Russia invaded in February 2022, which involved evacuating civilians from the front line, rebuilding houses, helping to run art camps and working with children. The title refers to an incident where he survived a drone strike while carrying out an evacuation of civilians from a front-line town, where wet ground – in the literal sense – prevented a missile from detonating. A colleague, in the car with him at the time, lost several limbs.

While much of the book was completed in the years since the conflict began, Shahrokhshahi doesn’t see it as a work of war photography. “That doesn’t interest me – a lot of it anyway. Obviously, there are amazing war photographers like Tim Hetherington, but for me, his pictures aren’t really about war either: they’re about connection and love and family and loss,” he says. The conflict is a presence in many of these photographs – a shot of a pair of bloody knees, for example, evokes a sense of creeping violence; another depicts a bored-looking man scrolling through his phone beneath a wall of mounted guns - but it is rarely the direct subject. Shahrokhshahi is interested more in the duality of life in wartime, the moments of absurdity, like finding yourself at a conflict zone and an orgy within the same day; the “beauty in the everyday that exists within the chaos” and “what happens to a society when its existence is threatened”.

Wet Grounds is his first project in black-and-white, a highly effective creative decision borne out of financial necessity. “When I started this, I was pretty broke, to be honest,” he says, and the cost of colour film had spiked at the time. Shooting with a large-format camera, a colour shot would have cost around £10 and a black-and-white shot just eighty pence, making the decision an “absolute no-brainer”. He used a flash in order to evoke newspaper photography and to create the sense of "examining things in an almost clinical manner”.

In this respect, one of his inspirations was Evidence (1977), a book by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, which consists of photography pulled from military and police archives, repurposing images which, in their original form, were purely about conveying information and acting as documentation. At the same time, there is an eerie, dream-like quality to many of his images: one shot, depicting a line of figures in white dresses and floral wreaths holding hands as they move through a dark forest, is both idyllic and sinister, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream crossed with The Wicker Man. “If you took a poem, and then you took newspaper photography, and they had sex, then hopefully the baby would be what I’ve been attempting to do with this work,” he says.

During his time in Ukraine, Shahrokhshahi realised that simply taking photographs and spreading awareness about what was happening “just wasn’t good enough”. Alongside his work as a humanitarian volunteer,  he launched a series of magazines, The Sketchbook Series, which has so far raised around £40,000 for NGOs he works with. “That’s incredibly important to me, because I've been welcomed into that country with open arms. It’s just not right, in my opinion, to go somewhere and just take because, especially with photography, you are taking something from someone. They’re giving you a picture, they’re giving you that time. And I think every artist has a social and moral responsibility to use their work for good.“

Wet Ground is published by Loose Joints and available to purchase here.