On The Lisa Burke Show, he talks about Ukraine, grief, fear and why the best pictures are felt rather than focused.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, the roads out of Ukraine were jammed with five lanes of people trying to leave. There was one car going in. Eddy van Wessel was driving it.
He had no bulletproof vest, just a few cameras and the memory of Grozny in 1999, when he went in with Chechen fighters as Russian forces encircled the city. Eddy expected Kyiv to fall within days. Instead he watched Ukraine hold, and he has kept going back ever since, on trips of four to six weeks, in an old car with a grenade hole in it.
Van Wessel's book, Ukraine, brings together around two hundred photographs from more than three years of those journeys. He joined me in Luxembourg as the guest of Dutch Ambassador Carin Lobbezoo, as the Netherlands takes its turn leading the Advocacy Coalition for Ukraine this November.
People often call him brave. He disagrees.
"I'm not brave. I'm just more curious than I'm afraid."
For van Wessel, you cannot cover a war from the sidelines. You have to get as close as possible and share what people are feeling. At the funeral of Yuliya and Anna, fourteen-year-old twins killed in the 2023 missile strike on a pizzeria in Kramatorsk, he held back, afraid to intrude on such intense grief. Only when a mourner asked him to offer his condolences to the parents afterwards did he feel accepted. He was crying as he took the pictures. He is a father of twins himself.
"I'm not a war photographer. I'm a human photographer. You should be as vulnerable as you can allow yourself to be, to survive the event and capture what you feel."
That closeness has a cost. Last year, sheltering in a trench around fifty metres from Russian positions, his group was spotted by a drone and shelled. Of the four people there that day, two are still alive.
Van Wessel shoots on a thirty-year-old analogue camera that takes no batteries, and on a panoramic Widelux with a rotating lens. Neither can send images or reveal his location, so commanders see a harmless older man rather than a threat. As he puts it, people see him as a person first and a photographer second.
He develops the film himself, sometimes two days later, sometimes two weeks. Not seeing what he has shot, he says, makes him hungrier for the better picture. And he chooses the moment to press the shutter by instinct.
"I always make a joke that my best images are not sharp. If you start noticing the focus of an image, something is wrong with the content."
Eddy is not chasing headlines. He sees himself as a historian who writes with images, making pictures that freeze time so that someone can look at them in fifty years and feel the same moment.
Four years in, he has watched the mood shift. At first, everyone was a patriot fighting for freedom. Now, he says, Ukrainians fight not to lose. Some soldiers have not been rotated off the front line for a year, because drones make the journey too deadly.
He has seen the war split lives in opposite directions. A young student friend, once fiercely pro-Ukrainian, is now trying to leave after losing too many friends. A journalist he works with gave up his job to enlist.
Last winter he photographed war widows, aged from twenty-five to fifty, on glass plates with a very old camera. What struck him on those huge negatives was the eyes, and a sadness he says is beyond words.
"The men give their lives. But the women and children pay the highest price, because they have to live on with it."
Van Wessel's last trip left him depressed, the feeling settling over him like a heavy blanket. His way of coping is to share it. When he publishes and talks about what he has seen, he says, he makes it your problem too, and that lets him go back again.
After three decades of witnessing death, from Bosnia to Chechnya, Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, I asked him what he believes gives life its meaning. His answer was the simple fact of people being civilised and humane with one another, something he warns is never free.
"We are monsters, all of us. And as soon as we let this out, it might be the end of everything we have gathered. Peace is so precious."
There is still a thread of hope. Bosnia, he says, remains stuck in its past, while in Syria he now sees people determined to move forward. You should never forget the past, but you must look to the future to leave a war behind.
His Ukraine photographs are on show at the National Military Museum in the Netherlands, where the exhibition has been extended four times and is updated after each trip. His work in Ukraine is also the subject of Joost van der Valk's documentary Eddy's War. The book has sold out, but van Wessel still has a few signed copies available by email, and a reprint is on the way.
And Eddy has already returned to Ukraine by the time you read this.
His next story: how Ukraine's elderly will survive a winter with little electricity, gas or heat.
