On Elena Subach

This is a critical question. Is there a place for beauty in the context of suffering? In an old Lviv apartment, Ukrainian photographer Elena Subach speaks about her series “New borders of my body” (2025), which mounts a profound philosophical inquiry into the interplay between ethics and aesthetics. In this new body of work, her camera turns toward former soldiers and civilians with amputated limbs undergoing rehabilitation at the Superhumans Center, a public hospital for the treatment and rehabilitation of war victims, which opened in Lviv Oblast in 2023. 

During her time at the Center, Subach was captivated by a scene in the swimming pool, where people were relearning, or perhaps reclaiming, their own bodies through movement in water. It was within this choreography—this reflection of the human form refracted through light and water—that Subach recognized something she called beauty. But what kind of beauty is this?

I look at her vivid photographs, luminous with color and kinetic bodies suspended in liquid light, and I see a beauty grounded in motion, in the force of the body breaking the stillness of water. A beauty rooted in attention, that directs the gaze toward moral questions heightened by war, pain, and loss. Writing of the fraught relationship between beauty and suffering, Simone Weil explored how people shield themselves from pain—how fear of vulnerability often leads to a willful blindness. To illustrate this, she turned to the metaphor of the windowpane: our gaze does not rest on the glass but passes through it. In Subach’s case, it is not the water but the photograph itself that functions as this transparent medium. Attention to suffering through beauty lies at the core of Weil’s philosophy and, likewise, at the heart of Subach’s artistic practice.

Subach was born in a coal-mining town in the Lviv region; her grandfather was a miner who painted icons. She now lives in Lviv, a city where the visual language of religion and light permeates public life. But her earliest landscape was one of provinciality and death. “My path in photography began with walks among Soviet-era apartment blocks surrounded by empty fields or through dusty, vanishing villages,” she said in her Manifesto, written in 2021 for Secondary Archive project. Like Weil’s writings, Subach’s works are suffused with a Christian ethical sensibility, though they never adopt the language of doctrine, commandments, or literal citation. Weil wrote that God is found in silence. Subach, in turn, speaks of working with “small and invisible things—so-called quiet topics.”1

For Subach, attention is that which reveals what has been hidden. We see this in her series “Hidden” (2022), where she documents methods of safeguarding artworks in Lviv—both in public spaces and in religious or cultural institutions. “Chairs” (2022) depicts empty seats in a volunteer center where Subach herself worked in 2022—chairs that once held internally displaced people and refugees. In both series, suffering appears to remain outside the frame, yet the captured image conveys the full gravity of loss and displacement.

In interviews, Subach has noted that the “Hidden” and “Chairs" series emerged from her inability, at the time, to photograph people directly. Photography, she felt, would intrude upon private suffering and risk exacerbating trauma. But in time, she turned to documenting the lives of those displaced by war and resettled in Lviv. “New borders of my body” is essentially only her second work since the full-scale invasion in which the human figure appears. But these are not portraits in the traditional sense. While Subach engaged with each subject—heard their stories and gained their trust—what the work conveys most powerfully is a metaphysical resilience. She reveals not only the physical body but also the body’s spirit and its capacity for self-reclamation. 

Gentle blue; deep blue; rich, almost neon, green; bright orange; resinous black; pinkish white: сolor, in Subach’s vivid images, is above all a mode of relation—a way of attending to the world. These series reveal not the saturation of pigment, but the saturation of feeling. Of a desire to draw one’s own gaze—and that of others—toward solidarity. What deserves such concentrated attention, if not the fragility of the world, the war, and the suffering of others?

Looking at Subach’s photographs, I think of Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies.” Monet painted that series while suffering from cataracts. His limited vision altered his representation: we see flowers floating on a field of blue water and shadow, but we know how strong the root system is that allows them to grow through water. Their long, elastic stems are deeply anchored in the soil beneath.

Subach’s subjects, likewise, conceal the roots of their trauma. They do not offer confession or narrative; they offer form. Their bodies, like lilies, float and flex, but are held fast by histories that remain invisible. Their beauty grows not despite trauma, but from within it.