Photographer Matteo Bergami is an Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this documentary photography. From the project ‘Dobryden’. To see Matteo’s body of work, click on any photograph.

Dobryden was the first word I learned in Ukrainian. In the villages of Ispas and Vyzhnytsia, in the Carpathians of Bucovina (Chernivtsi oblast), people always greet each other in the street, a simple gesture that says a lot: recognizing the other, sharing a fragment of everyday life. I spent two weeks in Ukraine, between July and August 2025, to meet my partner’s family and her origins. What came out of it is a visual story about the normality that resists next to war, and about how that normality, seen from here, stops feeling ordinary.

Artist Statement

There is a war a few hours from home. We know it through headlines. Through casualty counts. Through maps with lines that move each week. From here, it is easy to reduce an entire country to that single fact: a country at war.

Dobryden began somewhere else. Not on a front line, but in a minivan with eight seats, twenty six hours each way, going to meet the family of the woman I love, in a village most people outside Ukraine will never hear named.

Sirens. Blackouts that arrive without warning. Checkpoints. A passport kept close, always. And then, underneath all of it, something harder to photograph than combat: life that keeps going. Bread baked at dawn. Mass on Sunday. A boy at a piano in a room painted pink. A football match under floodlights in a small town. Ordinary things, repeated, stubbornly, day after day.

Beside them, quietly, the other register. A funeral poster by a front door. A flag on a gate. A wooden cross in a field. A soldier writing in silence on a bus. Nobody stops for these things. Nobody looks away from them either. They live inside the same streets, the same families, the same ordinary days.

I did not separate the two. I refused to build a contrast between them, the domestic and the wartime, because the people living both do not experience them as separate. I let them share the same frame. The same roll of film.

Dobryden means good morning. It was the first word I learned there. Said in the street, to a stranger, it sounds simple. Said in a country under constant threat, it becomes something else: proof that the person saying it is still there, still choosing to greet the day.

Sitting at a table. Going to mass. Playing football at dusk. Elsewhere these are nothing. Here they are a form of persistence.

I worked with natural light, close in the moments of intimacy, wider when the landscape needed room to breathe. No staging. Nothing arranged. The post production follows the rest of my documentary work: strong contrast, warm tones indoors, a quiet desaturation outside, so the loud moments and the silent ones carry the same weight.

Then I came home. Where we choose to go to the beach, or stay out late, or say nothing about curfews because there are none. Dobryden is not a war story in the way that word usually means. It is a record of what is left of ordinary life when war becomes the noise underneath everything else, and of how ordinary life, a greeting, a shared meal, a song at a piano, becomes, without ever meaning to, an act of resistance.

Matteo Bergami is an Italian reportage and sports photographer based in Bologna, working on long term documentary projects centered on identity, memory, and everyday life in contexts marked by conflict or marginality. His work has been published in several magazines and has received multiple international awards. He favors a slow working method, built on trust with the people he photographs rather than on the immediacy of the event. Dobryden began as a personal journey, meeting his partner's family in Ukraine, and became a visual story about the quiet resistance of normality in wartime.

All images and text © Matteo Bergami