Mark Neville, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated finalist who has lived in Kyiv since 2020, has opened his first major Los Angeles presentation of photography from Ukraine. "Postcode Ukraine: Diary of a Volunteer," presented with the Wende Museum at Westwood Contemporary, the museum's pop-up space on Westwood Boulevard, opened Sept. 11 and remains on view through Wednesday. All proceeds go to Postcode Ukraine, the charity Neville co-founded, which has funded more than $500,000 in local aid projects since 2022.

Neville's path to the exhibition began with displacement. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022, he and his wife crossed into Poland on foot, alongside millions of others. Within four weeks he returned and founded the charity, which delivers humanitarian aid across Ukraine alongside his photography.

"I needed to help," Neville said. "I'd fallen in love not just with my wife but with the whole country, and it was really my new adopted home."

He rejects the notion that conflict photographers have no time to help the people in crisis, arguing that photographers and other artists carry a moral imperative to aid those in the middle of war as well as to document it.

"I'm not a political leader," Neville said. "I'm not a military strategist. I'm not a soldier. I can't fire a gun. But what I can do is this."

The exhibition takes its name and substance from Neville's book, a personal record of the front lines built from more than 100 photographs he made between 2022 and 2024 on humanitarian aid trips to frontline towns. The images document volunteers, families and communities living through the Russia-Ukraine war.

Neville shoots exclusively on analog film, sometimes with a large plate camera that takes around 30 minutes to set up on a tripod — a commitment he maintains even in war zones. The deliberate slowness is a conscious position against the digital workflow of photojournalists, who must document events quickly and accurately as they unfold. Neville wants to offer different visual information, drawn from the margins of the conflict rather than its center. He compared photographing war to a sun: too large to look at directly. Meaningful images, he said, come from looking at the shadows — the smaller stories of people living their day-to-day lives.

One photograph in the show depicts schoolchildren sitting on a burned-out bus that was shelled along with their nearby school. The children would have been killed had they been there at that moment.

"There was a sense in which I saw these children in the photograph almost as ghosts," Neville said. "Because they could have been ghosts — they could have been materially killed."

The exhibition's central image, printed on vinyl outside the gallery entrance, is a color portrait of Sasha, a stylist-turned-soldier whom Neville photographed three times after the first invasion. Her boyfriend was killed about a month before the portrait was taken. She died two weeks after the session.

"She was just one of those people you could never imagine not being around," Neville said. "You thought they're kind of invincible somehow, and she wasn't."

A group of guest curators — including Prince Harry, Alyssa Milano and Sharon Stone — each selected one photograph and wrote a reflection, displayed on banners in the middle of the gallery. Los Angeles-based artist Lara Salmon, one of those curators, said the guest curators received a folder of photographs with short narratives; some accounts described women killed weeks after being photographed, while others described women concealing their partners' military service to protect themselves from sexual violence by Russian troops.

Salmon chose a portrait of Artem, a boy who found a bullet in his yard and tried to make something from it before it exploded. The image shows his visible facial wounds and bandaged hand.

"There's a sadness of an innocence that gets taken away from these children," Salmon said. "Even through the periods of perceived peace during these horrific invasions and genocides, children are still in danger, and children are always the victims."

Justinian Jampol, a UCLA alumnus and founder and executive director of the Wende Museum, said the project changed how he thinks about historical distance. He recalled a video call with Neville during which he heard air raid sirens, and the distance between Los Angeles and Kyiv collapsed.

"Context is everything," Jampol said. "The images couldn't possibly exist to their full potential without the understanding of the situation in which it was created. In their own right, they're aesthetically so moving and strong. When you layer on the knowledge of what's going on around it, it's just something that stays with you."

For Neville, the urgency is not abstract. Explosions now happen in Ukraine almost every day, he said, and a recent strike near his local supermarket reminded him why this exhibition matters now. "It is this critical moment," Neville said. "We need to feel that solidarity with people from Los Angeles and all over the world." As the show closes Wednesday, its proceeds will continue flowing into Postcode Ukraine's grassroots aid network — the work the photographs were made to sustain.