Sasha Kurmaz began Red Horse after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The project takes the form of a visual diary, assembled through daily collages of his own documentary photographs, found images, notes, drawings and objects picked up in the street. These materials bring the experience of war into contact with the small things that remain within reach. The subject is life in Ukraine as it is continually reshaped by destruction, including the artist’s own life and those of people around him.

Photography here works alongside other kinds of evidence. A found image has a different origin from a photograph made by Kurmaz, while a note or drawing introduces another way of responding to events. Bringing these materials together makes the diary more than a sequence of isolated documentary pictures. Its accumulation can be read as a record of attention under pressure: experiences are gathered, worked over and retained even while the conditions in which they occur keep changing.

Éditions Images Vevey published the 800-page English-language volume with graphic design by Nicolas Polli. At 17.5 by 25 centimetres, it gives this extended practice a substantial but hand-held form. The project received the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2023/2024; the published book subsequently won the 2026 Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. The latter jury emphasized its personal testimony and the way its pages register everyday existence under the conditions of war.

For collectors, the distinctive feature is the relationship between sustained diary-making and the physical extent of the book. Eight hundred pages allow an encounter with accumulation, rather than only a small selection of emblematic photographs. The combination of personal documentation and found material also makes it relevant to collections concerned with collage and artists’ responses to conflict. Its importance rests in preserving an individual, ongoing account without reducing that account to a single representative image.