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. 

August 13 & 20, 2012 Issue

James Wood is a sucker for flatness – flat prose, flat characters. In his admiring review of Teju Cole’s Open City, he says, “Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively ‘flat’ description” (“The Arrival of Enigmas,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011). In How Fiction Works (2008), he says of certain “flat” characters (e.g., Michael Henchard in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Gould in Nostromo), “Yet they are no less vivid, interesting or true as creations, for being flat.” And in the current issue of The New Yorker, reviewing Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, he quotes a seemingly prosaic passage detailing detergent brands and says, “Yet Knausgaard pauses to think aloud at this moment, and wrings a distinctively flat, rigorous poetry out of the Klorin and the Ajax.”

Wood can have his flatness. I’m not a fan of it. Flat prose is like flat beer – it’s dead. I seek vitality – “the strangeness of the vital,” as John Updike expressed it in the concluding sentence of his great “An Introduction to Three Novels by Henry Green,” Hugging the Shore, 1983). There’s an excellent example of “the strangeness of the vital” in this week’s issue of the magazine. I’m referring to Ben McGrath’s sparkling “Medals and Marketing,” a vitally swift, fluid, humorous, colorful account of life at the London Olympics with particular emphasis on the Games’ commercialization. Here’s one of my favorite passages: 

Good luck to anyone who brought a MasterCard or a Discover card with him to the Olympic Park, in Stratford, hoping to stock up on T-shirts featuring Wenlock, the one-eyed mascot. Visa only, please – and that goes for the A.T.M.s, too. So great was Visa’s investment in Phelps going into London that a couple of months ago the company’s head of global sponsorship marketing, Ricardo Fort, personally ironed a pink shirt for him in a midtown Manhattan hotel basement while Phelps conducted phone interviews to promote Visa’s Go World campaign, pausing occasionally to reload on calories with yogurt and granola.

What a surprising, delightful mix of facts and images! Look at the variety of ingredients – Olympic Park, credit cards, T-shirts, one-eyed mascot, A.T.Ms, Phelps, iron, pink shirt, Manhattan hotel basement, phone interviews, yogurt, and granola. This is an original word combo; it’s typical of almost every passage in the piece.

Here’s another example:

Doubles canoeing presented a real dilemma: do you go flat water, and catch the Belarussian Bahdanovich brothers, or white water, and see the Slovakian Hochschorner twins? In the end, I took Mayor Boris Johnson’s advice, and went to Horse Guards parade, near Buckingham Palace, in search of ‘wet otters’ – Johnson’s euphemism, in an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph, for the women of beach volleyball.

The piece is endlessly quotable. McGrath’s collection and arrangement of variegated materials – dialogue, quotation, tweets, songs, descriptions (“Her pirouette to the left looked slow and mannered, and her pirouette to the right began with a bit of a lurch and an over-large first step”), names, characters, terms, and aphorisms (“The Olympics are nothing if not a convention of salesmen”) – is amazing. Like the event it describes, “Medals and Marketing” is full of zing, juice and luster. I enjoyed it immensely.

Second Thoughts: The above post is unsatisfactory. It quotes from James Wood’s “Total Recall,” but it omits something important. It fails to say that “Total Recall” is one of the most stimulating reviews I’ve read this year. I devoured it. The passage that begins, “He notices everything – too much, no doubt – but often lingers beautifully,” is superb. And the ending (“Mourning, for Knausgaard, involves an acceptance that we are all things, even the people we have known and loved and hated will slowly leak away their meaning. Death and life finally unite, married in their ordinariness”) is inspired. Wood’s writing is one of this blog’s lodestars. If I sometimes quote it negatively, as I do above, I do so with the greatest respect.

Teju Cole's "Flat" Description

I’m still trying to figure out what James Wood meant by “‘flat’ description” in his review of Teju Cole’s novel Open City (“The Arrival of Enigmas,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011). In his piece, Wood talks about a particularly vivid image that occurs near the end of Open City: Julius, the novel’s narrator, is attending a Carnegie Hall performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony; he sees an elderly lady walking up the aisle. Cole describes her as follows:

She walked slowly, and all eyes were on her, though all ears remained on the music. It was as though she had been summoned, and was leaving into death, drawn by a force invisible to us. The old woman was frail, with a thin crown of white hair that, backlit by the stage, became a halo, and she moved so slowly that she was like a mote suspended inside the slow-moving music.

Wood says,

Cole prepares his effects so patiently and cumulatively, over many pages of relatively “flat” description, that the image of the old woman leaving as if for death, suspended like a mote in the music, seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.

“Flat” in the sense that Cole’s description is dull and lifeless? I don’t think that’s what Wood means. The fact that he sets “flat” in quotation marks indicates that he’s using the word in a particular way – to denote a particular style of description. There’s a hint as to what he means when he says the image of the old woman “seems not forced or ornamental but natural and almost inevitable.” We know that Wood dislikes overly rich description. In his essay “John Updike’s Complacent God” (included in his 1999 collection The Broken Estate), he disdainfully refers to Updike’s “puffy lyricism” and “slathered detail.” He’s an anti-inflationist. When it comes to verbal representation of reality, he seems to prefer an almost literal transcription – the thing itself. It’s the kind of description that Teju Cole abundantly provides in Open City. For example, here’s Cole’s depiction of a section of Wall Street:

I walked toward the west. People bought food from a falafel vendor whose van was parked on the corner, or walked alone, in pairs, in threes. I saw black women in charcoal grey skirt suits, and young, clean-shaven Indian-American men. Just past Federal Hall, I walked past the glass frontage of the New York Sports Club. Right up against the glass in its brightly lit interior was a single row of exercise bicycles, all of them occupied by men and women in Lycra who pedaled in the silence and looked out at the commuters in the dusk. Near the corner of Nassau, a man in a scarf and fedora hat stood with an easel before him and painted the Stock Exchange in grisaille on a large canvas. A stack of completed paintings, also grisaille, of the same building seen from different angles, lay at his feet. I watched him work for a moment, as he loaded his brush, and with careful gestures applied white highlights to the acanthus of the six massive Corinthian columns of the Stock Exchange.

“I saw,” I watched,” “I noticed,” “I scrutinized” – these words occur frequently in Cole’s writing. His descriptions are built on data received through the eye. He rarely constructs a metaphor or simile, and when he does, it’s usually a fairly plain one (e.g., “The just risen sun came at the Hudson at such an acute angle that the river gleamed like aluminum roofing”).

There’s a Hopperesque quality to many of Cole’s descriptions that I really like. That image of the men and women on their exercise bicycles pedaling “in the silence,” looking out “at the commuters in the dusk,” in the above-quoted passage, for example, seems to me a scene that might’ve caught Hopper’s eye.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Cole’s “flat” description – what I understand “flat” to mean, at any rate – is his use of catalog. For example, here’s a passage from Open City in which he catalogs the details of the interior of a Chinese shop:

The shop, of which I was the sole customer, was a microcosm of Chinatown itself, with an endless array of curious objects: a profusion of bamboo cages as well as finely worked metal ones, hanging like lampshades from the ceiling; hand-carved chess sets on the ancient-looking bar between the customer and the shopkeeper’s bay; imitation Ming Dynasty lacquerware, which ranged in size from tiny decorative pots to round-bellied vases large enough to conceal a man; humorous pamphlets of the “Confucius say” variety, which had been printed in English in Hong Kong and which gave advice to those gentlemen who wished to find success with women; fine wooden chopsticks set on porcelain chopstick stands; glass bowls of every hue, thickness, and design; and, in a seemingly endless glass-fronted gallery high above the regular shelves, a series of brightly painted masks that run through every facial expression possible in the dramatist’s art.

I’m a sucker for compendiums of detail like the one above. They seem to me to be one of the most effective ways for a writer to reproduce reality. The trick is in knowing how to make something good, something artful, out of them. There’s an intriguing scrap of catalog writing under the title “Descriptions of Things and Atmosphere” in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s nonfiction collection The Crack Up that reads as follows:

Seen in a Junk Yard: Dogs, chickens with few claws, brass fittings, T’s elbow, rust everywhere, bales of metal 1800 lbs, plumbing fixtures, bathtubs, sinks, water, pumps, wheels, Fordson tractor, acetylene lamps for tractors, sewing machine, bell on dinghy, box of bolts, (No.1), van, stove, auto stuff (No.2), army trucks, cast iron body, hot dog stand, dinky engines, sprockets like watch parts, hinge all taken apart on building side, motorcycle radiators, George on the high army truck.

Fitzgerald must’ve made this entry in his notebook with the intention of someday turning it into something – a scene in a novel or short story, maybe. But, unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to do so. In Open City, Teju Cole integrates his catalogs of urban details into a larger narrative about a young man for whom walking in the city is “a release,” “a reminder of freedom.” He’s successfully done what all artists strive to do - shape reality’s welter into something meaningful.

February 28, 2011 Issue

There’s a strong flâneur tradition at The New Yorker (e.g., Joseph Mitchell’s classic accounts of poking around New York Harbor, Anthony Bailey’s pieces about his various strolls, Ian Frazier’s memorable account of his hike along Route 3), and it’s a pleasure to see it continue in this week’s issue of the magazine. James Wood, in his favorable review of Teju Cole’s debut novel, Open City, clearly enjoys novelist-as-flâneur writing. He likes it because, as he says, “what moves the prose forward is not event or contrivance but a steady, accidental inquiry, a firm pressurelessness (which is to say, what moves the prose forward is the prose – the desire to write, to defeat solitude by writing).” Of Wood's many fine descriptions of the book, the following passage clinched it for me:

Eschewing the systematic rigor of Sebald’s work, as well as its atmosphere of fatigued nervous tension, Cole has made his novel as close to a diary as a novel can get, with room for reflection, autobiography, stasis, and repetition. This is extremely difficult, and many accomplished novelists would botch it, since a sure hand is needed to make the writer’s careful stitching look like a thread merely being followed for its own sake. Mysteriously, wonderfully, Cole does not botch it: “When I turned around, I saw that I was at the entryway of the American Folk Art Museum. Never having visited before, I went in”; “In early December, I met a Haitian man in the underground catacombs of Penn Station”; The days went by slowly, and my sense of being entirely alone in the city intensified”; At the beginning of February, I went down to Wall Street to meet Parrish, the accountant who was doing my taxes, but I forgot to bring my checkbook”; Last night, I attended the performance of the Ninth Symphony, which is the work Mahler wrote after Das Lied von der Erde.”

Wood’s choice of quotation in the above excerpt is inspired! The five sentences quoted are my idea of the ideal sentence – subjective, specific, active, interesting. The only reservation I have about reading Open City is that, because it’s fiction, it’s not true to reality. I much prefer to read factual writing. Wood doesn’t appear to have any problem with this issue. He appears content to seek the real in fiction, an endeavor that has always struck me as paradoxical. Nevertheless, in light of Wood’s stimulating review, I intend to read Cole’s Open City. I’ll post my review of it in the near future.

The flâneur tradition continues in another piece in this week’s issue, as well. Ian Frazier’s Talk story “Bridge” describes a walk on the Walkway Over the Hudson, the former Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge, in Poughkeepsie, that is “the longest elevated pedestrian bridge in the world.” I enjoyed this piece immensely, particularly the following terrific description of river ice:

On the river’s surface, a vast field of broken ice, all white (ice slabs), dark brown (water), and light brown (ice slabs under water), in a pattern of splendid randomness like winter camouflage, proceeded slowly oceanward.

How fine that “in a pattern of splendid randomness like winter camouflage” is! Frazier’s on a roll in the Talk department. In addition to “Bridge,” he’s written at least four other dandies in the past year. They are: “The Big Shoe” (February 1, 2010), “Lovefest” (March 1, 2010), “Parade of the Night” (September 20, 2010), and “Shower” (January 24, 2011).