Now Available: Ko Sasaki’s Photobook “XEPCOH – Kherson: On Nights of Falling Missiles”

10/01/2025

Ko Sasaki began this project after spending 126 days in the summer of 2022 in southern Ukraine, while the country was under Russian invasion. Living alongside both civilians and soldiers, he quietly observed the fragile threshold between daily life and war. To bring this work into being, he launched the photobook project “126 Days in Wartime Ukraine”, which was met with generous support.

In 2023, Sasaki joined the PHOTOBOOK MASTERCLASS at Reminders Photography Stronghold, where he further refined and deepened the project.

This book does not dwell on destruction or devastation. Instead, it gathers fragments of life—prayer, laughter, sleep, conversation. It avoids reducing experience into conventional images of war, and instead holds space for unnamed moments and passing gestures. Sasaki’s attentive presence reveals a reality in which war exists just beyond the edges of ordinary life—and reminds us that this reality may not be so far from our own.

We invite you to spend time with this book and experience the quiet gaze it holds.

To mark its publication, a solo exhibition Ko Sasaki: “XEPCOH – Kherson: On Nights of Falling Missiles” will be held at Reminders Photography Stronghold from November 15 (Sat) to November 30 (Sun), 2025. An opening reception and artist talk will be held at 2:00 PM on the first day. We warmly welcome your visit.

About the Book

“Like a terrible dream.”
That was how my friend Andrii described it, in a chat during one of those nights when missiles were falling.

By the summer of 2022—six months into Russia’s full-scale invasion—missiles were striking southern Ukraine almost every night.

Suffering arrived like a random lottery—without warning, without logic. Unless you were close to the blast, you might not even realize it had happened. The unreality of it all made me wonder if somewhere, a parallel world still existed where things remained as they should be.

On Independence Day in August, air raid sirens could barely be heard over the sound of children shouting as they jumped into the river at the center of town. Families sat along the riverbank, basking in the summer sun.

A few days later, a shopkeeper told me how a missile attack the previous night had destroyed buildings and set cars on fire. The noise and the emergency response had made it impossible to sleep. I vaguely recalled hearing something during the night.

I went to see the Soviet-style apartment building that had been hit. Residents were cleaning up. Among them was a boy I had photographed earlier that week, wrapped in a Ukrainian flag by the river. Now he was carrying boxes of belongings down the stairs with a few others. When our eyes met, I gestured to ask if I could follow. He shook his head with a tired look and turned back up the stairs.

Not long after, I was introduced by a friend to a group of volunteer fighters, made up of former soldiers. After several outings with them, I was accepted and ended up spending about two months sharing their daily lives. That summer, Ukraine had begun a counteroffensive in the south, with the goal of reclaiming Kherson Oblast.

Roughly 30 kilometers from the town where we stayed stretched the so-called “zero line”—a contested strip between Ukrainian and Russian forces. Another 30 kilometers beyond that lay the Russian-occupied city of Kherson.

One day, in a village near the zero line, soldiers fired mortars toward Russian positions. Moments later, the Russians returned fire. We dove into a nearby basement. As the shells exploded overhead, a soldier passed the time watching car videos on Instagram. Each impact filled the space with dust. He flinched for a moment, then turned back to his phone.

In a ruined village further from the front line, another soldier chatted with a woman he had met on a dating app, lying on a makeshift bed in a bombed-out basement. “I’m looking forward to seeing her when I go back to the city on Sunday,” he said. While waiting to take his turn on watch, he drifted off to sleep.

This book is not a chronicle of destruction, nor an accusation. It’s a record of people—eating, laughing, sleeping, crying, fighting, praying, fleeing, being born, dying—people no different from us.

Why does such horror happen in a place that looks so much like paradise?

This is a story about how war exists just beyond the horizon of daily life.

Text & Photography by Ko Sasaki

Ko Sasaki Photobook “XEPCOH – Kherson: On Nights of Falling Missiles”