Eddy van Wessel has spent decades photographing conflict, and *Ukraine* (Fw:Books, 2025) gathers three years of that work into a single, deliberately unglamorous account. The book’s subject is the war as it is lived: soldiers at the front, civilians sheltering in shattered towns and cities, and those who have fled. What distinguishes the project is van Wessel’s working method. He photographs on analogue film, and he pairs the images with first-hand testimonies, so the sequence moves between what can be seen and what survivors and combatants say about it. The combination resists the easy monumentality that war photography often falls into; destruction and psychological weariness are given equal weight.

The questions the book poses are ethical rather than documentary in any narrow sense. Where does humanity end and inhumanity begin? How is dignity maintained under continuous threat? What does survival mean when necessities, including life itself, are no longer assured? These are the terms in which *Ukraine* frames the largest war in Europe since World War II, and they are why the photographs read as layered rather than merely evidentiary. Mustafa Can contributes texts alongside van Wessel’s own writing, and the two voices extend the book’s range without displacing the photographs as its center.

Fw:Books issues the volume at 24 by 28 centimeters, 240 pages, in softcover, with English texts. The format is large enough to honor the film’s detail but not so large that it turns the material into spectacle. The sequencing carries the argument: displacement, endurance, and the slow accumulation of damage are arranged rather than merely collected. For a collector, the book’s value lies in that editorial intelligence—an analogue record and a set of testimonies made during an ongoing war, assembled as a considered whole rather than a news portfolio.