Wesley Verhoeve’s Photography Book of Everyday Life in Ukraine, Without the War

I just returned from my second trip to Ukraine in about a year. Both trips left me with the same impression: the Ukraine I keep going back for is the one at the kitchen table. The kettle, the cups, the way the light comes through the window in the morning. That is what I wanted to put in my new book.

My book NOTICE Journal, Volume Two came out this week. It is from the first of those two trips, last summer. 71 in-camera diptychs shot entirely on a 1964 Olympus Pen-F half-frame. No war photographs. Just daily life, in the countryside and in the city, and the small rituals that keep a life feeling like a life when everything around it is uncertain. Pictures of what is at stake.

I used one camera and one lens to make the entire body of work this book was born out of: the Olympus Pen-F and its 38mm lens. This camera is a half-frame camera, which means it cuts a 35mm frame in two. Every exposure is actually half of a pair. You compose the left side, wind on, and then compose the right, and those two pictures live together on the roll forever. There is no undoing it in the edit. You either see the pairing in the moment or you don’t. I shot the whole book that way, 71 diptychs made in-camera, and the discipline of it changed how I moved through rooms and streets. I slowed down. I stayed longer. I waited for the second half of the picture to walk in.

The decision to leave war imagery out was made by following my own instincts. I have real respect for conflict photographers and the work they do. I cannot imagine what they go through to show the world what the world needs to see. My trip was not about photography, and I did not go to the front. I was there to visit my partner’s family, but I always carry my camera and I cannot help myself. I document what I notice, and those are usually the small moments of beauty and surprise of the every day. That being said, the war was of course everywhere, in the background of every image. Underneath every joke and conversation. The book acknowledges it in a few small ways, but what the family wanted people to see first was the life, not the backdrop. What is at stake, not the violence.

For the gear nerds reading, I traveled light on both trips. The Pen-F and one lens, a small digital body for color notes, a handful of rolls of Kodak and Ilford films, and a notebook. I could pull the Pen-F out one-handed while someone was mid-sentence, which is most of what I needed from a setup. Trains across the country, long walks through villages, overnight bags on hotel floors. Nothing precious.

The book is a collaboration more than a solo project. Julia Kochetova, who won the World Press Photo of the Year in 2025, wrote a short essay. Alison Roman and Anastasiia Klymenko contributed recipes that sit alongside the images, grounded in the same cooking and eating we did on the trip. Jeffrey Phillips drew an illustrated map. Maxwell George designed it, from New York, with a kalyna berry cover inspired by 1960s Ukrainian packaging. Only 500 copies, printed by robstolk in Amsterdam, and bound in the last weeks before shipping.

NOTICE Journal, Volume Two is available now at www.newstyle.co, and every order through 31 October includes a limited edition bonus zine. Shipping starts early November. The hope is simple. I want people to look at Ukraine and see a family at the table, before they see anything else.