Most photojournalists covering the pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine work in the Donetsk area, where a small industry of fixers and drivers has developed. Images of the same people in similar scenes are frequently the result.

The Belgian photographer Thomas de Wouters took a less-traveled route last April, crossing multiple checkpoints on damaged roads to Luhansk — a forlorn city that now bears scars of the continuing war.

Many of its buildings were destroyed, and the streets often empty of residents. Every day, Mr. de Wouters, 45, heard bombs exploding near the villages north of the city, but none of its inhabitants seemed to notice.

“There were mainly women, children and the old and infirm just doing their best to eat every day,” he said. “The men were either fighting Ukraine or working in Russia to support their families.”

Subject matter sets Mr. de Wouters’s images apart, as does his visual approach. His strange, square, black-and-white images look as if they were made by a 1960s-era New York street photographer set loose on the modern-day front between Russia and Ukraine.

Photo

The photographs from Luhansk and nearby towns are unlike any other reportage of the separatist areas of Ukraine. This distinction may be in part because of Mr. de Wouters’s background. He has been shooting seriously for only two years, having previously worked as an engineer and a financial counselor.

Although Mr. de Wouters had photographed sporadically throughout his life, the Maidan revolution was the turning point for his beginning to take pictures seriously. He followed the unfolding events on his car radio, mesmerized by what he perceived as a historic moment happening close to where he lived.

In February 2014, he decided to see, and photograph, the events in Kiev. For five days, he lived in a tent in Maidan Square with protesters and sold a few photos to a Belgian newspaper, La Libre Belgique.

Last winter, Mr. de Wouters decided to photograph the humanitarian situation in Luhansk, but his trip had to be delayed because of brain cancer surgery. He made the decision to pursue photography full time after the operation, and the trip to Luhansk became a way of proving to himself that he could beat the disease.

He worked with a Nikon camera, modified by masking the film plane and view finder to make square images. His choice of working in analog photography was not for technical or aesthetic reasons, but simply because it slowed him down.

Photo

“If I have a roll of 36 pictures, I know I cannot shoot and shoot and shoot,” he said. “I will take more time and think. I will sit for half an hour talking with the people before taking the first picture because I am not in a hurry. It’s purposeful because I know it’s three rolls of film a day or less.”

He said he approached the work in Luhansk neutrally, without taking sides, but he was not working in a typical journalistic manner.

Instead, he expressed in photographs what he saw and experienced from a personal point of view. It was not an objective approach, but a subjective one — though it could be argued to be still truthful and honest.

In Luhansk, Mr. de Wouters encountered a city that had lost much of its vitality.

Although residents were opposed to the government in Kiev, many had tired of the continual fighting, he said. Electricity and heat were rare. Shops were mostly empty of food and goods, and few residents held jobs. The workers at soup kitchens and old age homes had not been paid in months, yet continued doing their jobs, he added.

After three weeks, Mr. de Wouters returned to Belgium, emotionally exhausted and weary.

“Luhansk is less than 3,000 kilometers from where I live, yet those people are living like we did 70 years ago, after World War II, when displaced people were moving from one country to another,” he said. “You feel a bit powerless. What can we do except make some images?”

Follow @JamesEstrin and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook and Instagram.