In her book and exhibit “Afterwar,” Lori Grinker sought to capture veterans’ day-to-day lives. They cope with the physical and psychological effects of war, but they also work, exercise, and watch television. “What you see is them in their daily routine,” she says, “and it’s secondary that they’re missing a hand or a leg, or some kind of memory.”

Ms. Grinker spent 15 years documenting the effects of 20th-century wars on veterans all over the world. “After war” includes images of former soldiers from 29 countries and 24 conflicts, from World War I on.

A reception Friday at Nailya Alexander Gallery celebrates an exhibit that includes 11 of those photographs. Each image is accompanied by a short caption from Ms. Grinker’s interviews with her subject. She’ll give a slide presentation about her work next Friday. A larger exhibit at the United Nations closed last month .

In Russia, Ms. Grinker photographed Inna Grigorievna Kvitko, a woman who was in the Soviet Red Army during World War II. The elderly veteran holds up her first uniform for the camera. The caption reads: “We got as far as Viazma when the train was bombed. That’s when my hair turned gray. There were casualties everywhere.”

Gary Zuspann, an American Navy veteran of the Persian Gulf War, was photographed in a specially outfitted room in his parents’ Waco, Texas, home. He suffers from Gulf War syndrome and reports that he feels “like a prisoner of war.”

Some of the subjects’ memories are startlingly recent. A 1999 photograph shows a teenage girl who was forced to fight with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka.

“I used to read a lot of novels that are from people’s war experience,” the photojournalist says. “I have a really hard time with that now.”

Ms. Grinker says that her project impressed upon her the similarities of how the veterans talked about their lives, regardless of the wars in which they fought. “I wasn’t as interested in the politics as in the sameness of the people after the war. So many of them have the same exact experience.” She chose her subjects without regard to which side of a conflict they fought on, photographing a soldier in the German Army, Willi Schneekloth, against a slide projection of his World War II army unit.

“I’m not going to be so naive and idealistic to say we can end wars,” she explains. And though she spent time in Iraq embedded on the hospital ship USNS Comfort, she did not include the resulting images in “Afterwar.”

Her ultimate hope is to help viewers remember how long wars last even after the fighting is over. “Often when the wars end and its not in the news anymore, people think it’s over for the people that were fighting. I do feel that we’re all responsible for them. In some ways it could be any one of us.”

Reception: Friday, 6-8 p.m. Slide show: Friday, March 11, 6-8 p.m. Exhibit: Through Saturday, March 26, Nailya Alexander Gallery, 24 W. 57 St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, no. 501.