In Focus: "Frontline Rolls: Photos, Letters & Artifacts from Ukrainian Soldiers" by Serhii Melnychenko

The latest photobooks picks by Der Greif

“In Focus” is Der Greif’s photobook review series, spotlights our picks from the current open call for submissions and our community artists' most recent publications. This month, we bring out of our shelf Serhii Melnychenko’s book “Frontline Rolls: Photos, Letters & Artifacts from Ukrainian Soldiers,” a collaborative project extending from reportage to vernacular photography.

The photographs in this publication were collected by Melnychenko starting in 2025, when he started sending disposable film cameras to Ukrainian soldiers stationed across different sectors of the front line, inviting them to document their own lives, routines, surroundings, and work. A multi-layered succession of snapshots, scans, sketches and personal belongings, the book grounds war in the everyday. Raw and unedited photographs are further deepened by personal reflections and correspondence, and an anthology of scanned belongings the artists received from the soldiers.

At first glance, the book asserts the necessity of documenting the raw reality of life on the frontline, where images function as personal diaries. However, Melnychenko's work can’t fall into the categorization of the book as an archive. Instead of documenting "history in the making" for posterity, Melnychenko and the Ukrainian soldiers are engaged in an act of collective survival and reparation. What Jacques Derrida termed "archive fever" (the institutional drive to curate and control the past for the sake of future authority), is refused here. As the photographs represent a reparative seeing that functions in the immediate present. Here, the camera does not function as a tool for the archive, but as a practice of communal sense, an instinctual attempt to capture a reality as fleeting as it is ungraspable, acknowledging that while the camera offers a sense of agency, the world it captures remains beyond our command.

While traditional photojournalism often seeks the “decisive moment" in the explosive, the tragic, or the heroic, the soldiers’ gazes here gravitate toward the interstitial and quiet moment. By employing vernacular photography, Melnychenko bypasses the external gaze that tends to turn suffering into a spectacle. Instead, we see images that are visually nostalgic. By using disposable cameras, the images evoke the aesthetic of the 1990s and early 2000s family albums. Seeing a trench or a destroyed tank through the same grainy, warm-toned lens usually reserved for birthdays or holidays effectively ‘domesticates’ the war or bring it to the family album of the contemporary family at war. Through the lens of a disposable camera, the tactical environment of a trench or a dugout is reimagined as a domestic space, too.

Nonetheless the "reparative act", I argue, is found in the very act of collecting and containing intimacy by gathering these moments and photographed belongings into the book. We can look at Ursula K. Le Guin’s "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction," where the author argued that the first human tool was not the spear (the weapon of the hero), but the basket or the bag, interpretable as the mere container for gathering, which a book is too. While Le Guin’s interpretation of the spear is one that embeds it into stories of violence, conquest, and linear progression, much like traditional war reportage, the emerging "carrier bag” theory tells stories of holding, sustaining, and gathering things together. While the spear-narrative of war reportage seeks to pierce the moment to extract a singular, dramatic truth, these soldiers and Melnychenko are engaged in a process of gathering. Their photographs are the small, unheroic necessities.

This leads to a profound shift in responsibility. If the book is a container for intimacy rather than a monument to power, our role as viewers is no longer to be passive consumers of a spectacle. We become part of a communal sense-making process. We are tasked with holding these fleeting, ungraspable fragments alongside the soldiers, acknowledging that the act of gathering is perhaps the most potent resistance against erasure of indivudals, communities and cultures. Melnychenko’s collection reminds us that while the "spear" of war may dominate the headlines, it is the "carrier bag" of the domestic and the personal that allows a people to survive the weight of the present.

Bold style: Explore more of our community photobooks here. For more on the “Carrier Bag Theory” refer to Ursula K. Le Guin’s book “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” introduced by Donna Haraway. Also browse Alex Charey’s Artist Feature on Ukrainian civilians who joined the army to defend their home.