Nanna Heitmann

Documentary Photographer

BIOGRAPHY 

Nanna Heitmann (b. 1994) is a documentary photographer from Ulm, Germany. A regular contributor to The New York Times, she has spent the past three years documenting wartime Russia during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one of the few Western photographers working in the country.

Heitmann has documented the effects of climate change, such as catastrophic forest fires and melting permafrost in Siberia (As Frozen Lands Burn), as well as the peatlands of the Congo Basin, which serve as the world’s largest carbon reservoir (Beneath The Trees). She has been published by National Geographic, Time, The New Yorker and M Le Magazine du Monde, among others.

A full member of Magnum Photos since 2023, she was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography.

PHOTO: Underground Field Hospital

The soldier was conscripted to fight for the Russian-backed, separatist “republic” of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on 22 February 2022, two days before the full-scale Russian invasion of the country. Later, Russia unilaterally annexed the territory, and the militia that conscripted him was merged into a unit of the Russian army. Russia has occupied vast swathes of eastern Ukraine, and the city of Bakhmut has seen some of the bloodiest battles of the war.