WATERVILLE, Maine — In his apartment overlooking the Kennebec River, Mike Seamans had his TV tuned to CNN and its coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One might think he’d seen enough of the grief and heartbreak in that country after spending four weeks in April there and in neighboring Moldova, covering the plight of some of the millions of Ukrainians — a staggering one-quarter of the population — who’ve been driven from their homes.
As an award-winning photojournalist, Seamans is no stranger to human suffering. In Ukraine, his job was to tell the stories of the displaced and capture the emotions of women and children saying goodbye to husbands, fathers and sons, unsure of whether they would ever see one another again.
For Seamans, the most wrenching aspect of the job was not actually shooting the photos.
“The hard part was having to download [them] and then look at [them] again, go through which pictures to file, caption them,” he said. “That was the painful process.”
Back in his hotel room at the end of the day, looking over the photos he’d taken and reflecting on the misery he’d seen, his own emotions would finally come out.
“And they would hit hard,” he said. “I mean, I would have to close the computer at times because the emotions would take over.”
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting provided the financial support for Seamans, a longtime staff photographer with the Central Maine Morning Sentinel newspaper, to take on the Ukraine assignment. He is grateful to the center and USA Today, which published his photos.
Perhaps no organization has impressed him more, though, than Team Humanity, a nonprofit on the ground in Ukraine and Moldova providing essential goods and services to refugees, most of whom are women and children. Of Team Humanity’s work, Seamans said simply: “It’s heroic.”