Jule Wild’s “Find me near the chestnut trees” takes its title from Kyiv’s chestnut trees, the city’s living emblem, and from the problem of locating anyone at all once the full-scale invasion began on 24 February 2022. Wild, a photographer, built the book around friends in Ukraine — people who left home without knowing whether return was possible, who stayed, who wrote to her from trains and overcrowded roads while explosions sounded behind them. The result is not reportage from the front but a record of the contiguous ordinary: routines rebuilt inside uncertainty, small happiness held against horror, the difficulty of planning a future.
Eigensinn Publishing issued the book in December 2025 as a 236-page hardcover, 20 × 14.5 cm, with a cover made from sandbag material — a physical decision that keeps the book’s subject in the hand rather than at a documentary distance. Texts by Anastasiia Kaminska, Oleksii Stislavsky and Vitalii Matukhno appear in Ukrainian and English, with translations by Marta Leskiv, Vitalii Matukhno and Oleksii Stislavsky; the design is by Paula Hornickel and Jule Wild. These contributions are written witnesses, not captions, and they sit alongside Wild’s photographs rather than illustrating them.
The photographs were made by Wild, and the book was awarded the Fotobus Society Library Award 2026. What distinguishes it is the refusal of a single register. Anger, guilt, grief, love, frustration and hope are not arranged into a narrative resolution; they coexist, as the artist describes the condition, simultaneously. The sandbag cover and the bilingual texts give that simultaneity a form. For collectors attentive to photobooks that register war as it is lived rather than as it is reported, this is a considered and affecting example published in a first edition of 700 copies, printed by Seltmann Printart in Germany. Its combination of personal testimony and photographic observation offers a way to understand how the war alters daily relationships over time.
