Ukrainian photojournalist Julia Kochetova brings her painfully intimate work to Foam Museum
A soldier protects a woman in an underground parking lot near the drone strike in Kyiv 2022 – Julia Kochetova
Watching unimaginable war crimes unfold before your eyes, day after day, reshapes something fundamental in you — but it doesn’t mean we should look away. Instead, maybe we should look even closer, beyond the 20 seconds videos and news headlines popping on our screens. In War is Personal, Ukrainian photojournalist Julia Kochetova invites us into a space where distance collapses. Her images sit with grief, with exhaustion, with compassion and vulnerability that emerges when life has been fractured.
People who move through their days with fear embedded into their gestures, from the way they hold each other to the way they walk. People inhabiting homes that no longer offer safety but distant reminders of it. Even language begins to falter, bending under the weight of what can’t quite be said. Kochetova’s images feel almost too close, like pages from a diary you’re not sure you have the right to read. But there’s an ethical invitation, bordering demand, to stay with each photograph a little longer than feels comfortable. Because the moment war slips into abstraction, it becomes easier to accept — and this work refuses that kind of forgetting.
Izium mass grave with tortured civilians and soldiers after the city was liberated from Russian occupation 2022 – Julia Kochetova
A teenager is setting a checkpoint in the village of Zelene in the Kharkiv region 2022 – Julia Kochetova
Recruit of the 68th Jaeger Brigade during training in the Donetsk region near the front line 2023 – Julia Kochetova
The holy icon next to the Molotov cocktail on the checkpoint near the road turn to Irpin Kyiv region 2022 – Julia Kochetova
On view at Foam untill May 25
Images Courtesy Of Photographer Julia Kochetova
