A member of the Kharkiv Police Department partakes in a nightly patrol to enforce the wartime curfew in Kharkiv, Ukraine. “Anyone who is found outside past the mandated 9pm curfew would be subjected to police interrogation and most likely arrested for the night,” explains the photographer Stanton Sharpe. “While most of the people caught roaming the streets past curfew are drunk civilians, there have been occasions where police have caught Russian spies operating under the darkness of Kharkiv nights, where all lights in the city are turned off to protect civilians from Russian aerial attacks.”
Stanton Sharpe is a documentary photographer and photojournalist. His main objective with photography is simple—to better understand humanity and to offer others underrepresented perspectives in our world. He works where he is most curious, and his work has taken him to various regions across Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, the United States and Europe.
Sharpe hopes that his work will encourage others to push beyond their personal boundaries and explore the world’s diverse environments, as he believes that empathy and acceptance can only be found through the courage to foster experience, relationship and education.