Eddy van Wessel's Ukraine War Photos

Photo by Eddy van Wessel, from his Ukraine (2025)

I’ve just finished reading Joshua Yaffa’s absorbing “At the Edge of Life and Death in Ukraine” (newyorker.com, August 2, 2025. It’s a review of a new photo book by Eddy van Wessel called Ukraine. Yaffa writes, “Most of the photographs in Ukraine were taken on the edges of violence; they are not gory and never prurient but instead are laced with a sense of what van Wessel called ‘the place where life and death touch each other.’ ” 

Yaffa’s piece is illustrated by fourteen photos from van Wessel’s book. They are compelling documents, records of human tragedy and atrocity. Are they more than that? Are they art? Is that a perverse question? They are superb photos. By that I mean they’re beautifully composed, sharply focused, richly detailed. And yet, I feel guilty responding to them this way. Who looks at war photos and sees beauty? I can’t find any precedents. 

Teju Cole touches on the issue in his “A Photograph Never Stands Still” (The New York Times Magazine, March 14, 2017), in which he analyzes his response to Danny Lyon’s “The Cotton Pickers.” He writes,

I hate “The Cotton Pickers.” It’s unpleasant to be confronted with the abasement of these men in the form of a photograph. But I love the photograph for its compositional harmony, which is like the harmony of a chain gang’s song, or like the paradoxical pleasure Northup took in the sight of a cotton field in bloom.

A photograph can’t help taming what it shows. We are accustomed to speaking about photographs as though they were identical to their subject matter. But photographs are also pictures — organized forms on a two-dimensional surface — and they are part of the history of pictures. A picture of something terrible will always be caught between two worlds: the world of “something terrible,” which might shock us or move us to a moral response, and the world of “a picture,” which generates an aesthetic response. The dazzle of art and the bitterness of life are yoked to each other. There is no escape.

Cole supports a binocular response to photos that show “something terrible.” We can be both morally outraged and aesthetically dazzled, he says. I take comfort from his words. They describe my own response to van Wessel’s arresting photos.