Aria Shahrokhshahi’s first monograph, Wet Ground, gathers more than five years of work made in Ukraine, beginning with repeated stays there from 2019 and continuing through Russia’s full-scale invasion. The British-Iranian artist works from inside the war rather than at a remove from it, living and volunteering in the country across many visits. Proximity, not spectacle, governs the pictures; the book withholds the visual shorthand that usually stands in for war.
The photographs, in stark black and white, run to seventy tritone plates across 144 pages. Shahrokhshahi’s scenes are frequently inscrutable, absurd, domestic, performative or oblique, and the sequencing returns often to young people and subcultures improvising ways to live. Threat, loss and anticipation press on a generation that keeps making room for resistance, rebellion and joy. The title comes from an episode during a medical evacuation from a frontline town, when wet ground prevented a missile from detonating; it also names a country whose terrain feels unreliable, where safety and danger sit close together.
The book is a collaboration as much as a solo statement. It includes a poem by Charlotte Shevchenko-Knight, is edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon, and is designed by Loose Joints Studio. Published by Loose Joints with an ISBN of 978-1-912719-74-7, it appears in a section-sewn debossed landscape hardcover with a tip-on cover. That format suits a body of work that depends on sequence and pace rather than single images, and it places the photographs within an ongoing humanitarian practice that also includes the documentary While We Heal and sculptural and installation work made in Ukraine.
Wet Ground was shortlisted for the 2026 Book Awards of Les Rencontres d’Arles and is published in March 2026. It belongs to a growing shelf of books that refuse the iconography of war in favour of daily life under pressure, and its attention to youth, subculture and the ordinary textures of endurance gives it a distinct place among them. Collectors who follow social documentary in book form, or the Loose Joints list, will find a considered object here: a long-term commitment, edited and designed with care, in which the photographs are asked to carry an argument about how life continues while a country resists erasure.
