Julia Kochetova shows war as personal loss at Foam

There are photographers documenting the war, and then there is Yulia Kochetova. She lives and works in Kyiv, drives to the front lines in the Donetsk region, and brings images you don't put away in the category of ‘journalism. Her exhibition ’War is Personal‘ in Foam shows what that means: war as something that happens to people, not as abstract geopolitics.

Kochetova (b. 1993) studied at Taras Shevchenko National University and the Mohyla School of Journalism in Ukraine, and later at the IDFAcademy here in the Netherlands. She knows what she is doing with a camera, and that has won her an Emmy Award in 2023 via Vice News, and in 2024 the World Press Photo Global Winner in the Open Format category, for this project. Two of the toughest awards in her field, for work she made while the city around her was under pressure.

The images she shows are concrete and calm at the same time. A teenager manning a checkpoint in the village of Zelene in the Kharkiv region, captured photographically in 2022, at an age when you normally have other things on your mind. A soldier protecting a woman in an underground parking garage in Kyiv, after a drone attack on Oct. 17, 2022. A holy icon next to a Molotov cocktail at a checkpoint near Irpin. The combination of the sacred and the violent says more in one image than a page of text.

Kochetova is there when the war is not on the news. She photographs the preparation, the waiting, the routine that develops in a situation that is actually anything but routine.

‘War is Personal’ is part of Foam's multi-year research program ‘The Camera as a Weapon,’ launched in early 2024. The exhibition is made possible in part by the Ribbink-van den Hoek Family Foundation, Protect Ukraine Foundation, the V Fund and Kleurgamma Fine Art Photolab. Foam is in a canal house on Keizersgracht, in the historic center. The exhibition runs until May 25, 2026. Plenty of time to go, but don't wait too long either. This is work that demands attention.