About the Project
With so much at stake — and so much in flux — in the Black Sea region, we thought it would be valuable to build a shared visual archive. In February 2025 we asked the Davis Center community of students, scholars, alums, and supporters to send us original photographs taken during their travels to, or residence in, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova. We are excited to share the images — and the stories they tell — with all of you.
Each Friday from March through May 2025 we will add a photograph that tells a compelling story about life in and around the Black Sea. Check in to watch the gallery grow, and stay tuned for a podcast conversation with our community photographers in May!
Meet the Photographers
"On Duty" (March 8, 2025): Isabelle DeSisto is a PhD candidate in politics at Princeton University. She earned both her B.A. in government (summa cum laude) and her M.A. in regional studies (Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia) from Harvard. Read more about her here.
"Stairway to Nowhere" (December 8, 2019): Taylor Zajicek is a historian of environmental change in modern Eurasia and the Middle East. He earned his PhD at Princeton and is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia in 2024-2025. Read about his current book project, an environmental history of the Black Sea in the 20th century, or his piece on the environmental impact of Russia's war against Ukraine.
"Trouty Fingers": Evan Woodnorth has worked and lived in Azerbaijan and Turkey.
View the Photographs
The images assembled below are available via a CC BY-SA-NC 4.0 license. You are free to use and share them for non-commercial purposes so long as you credit the photographer(s).
To read about the image you are viewing, click the stack of horizontal lines next to the blue "plus" sign below. Use your mouse to pan and zoom into the image. To turn off the thumbnail row at the bottom, click the "window views" icon on the right of the display. To open the gallery in its own window, click here.