‘Tattoos of war’ — haunting portraits of Ukrainians’ most painful wartime memories (Photos)

In everyday life, these people might appear normal: they have no physical wounds, their loved ones and children are alive by their side.

But Ukrainian photographer Sergey Melnitchenko’s black-and-white portraits reveal the chilling depths that stand between his subjects and normalcy. They gaze outward with calm, matter-of-fact expressions, while the massive superimposed projection of their most haunting war memories distorts their features.

The subjects choose the photos themselves, said Melnitchenko, who features his friends, fiancée, and son in a conceptual photography project, “Tattoos of war."

The photo — either taken by the subjects or sourced on news websites — represents the most painful memory they associate with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that began in February 2022. After more than three years of relentless Russian attacks on the country that have killed tens of thousands of people, Ukrainians face no shortage of such memories.

“It is an impossible task, in fact,” Melnitchenko told the Kyiv Independent. “Because everyone has hundreds of these memories. You have to choose one, as if to convince yourself that this event was the most difficult, the most tragic. Although every event that concerns our country during the war is the worst."

For Melnitchenko, each photo from the project carries the weight of events that he and his subjects can still hardly comprehend.

One of the most challenging portraits for him was a photo of his friends Maryna and Serhii against the backdrop of the Mykolaiv Regional State Administration in their native city, destroyed by a Russian missile on March 29, 2022.

As a result of the attack, the central section of the building collapsed from the ninth to the first floor, killing 37 people. Maryna and Serhii fled the city a year ago, but the memory — a “tattoo” —  will stay with them forever, Melnitchenko says in his photo book about the project.

But during the last shoot from the series at the end of 2024 with the family of Andrii, Viktoria, and their daughter Kira, Melnitchenko witnessed for the first time how one could transform their tragic memories into a source of strength.

The family chose a photo of a beach with pine trees on a riverbank of the Dnipro River, where they loved spending time before the full-scale invasion began.

Russia currently occupies this beach in Kakhovka, Kherson region. But even under occupation, the vision from the photograph is probably long gone, as Russia’s destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant’s dam reshaped the water terrain in the oblast.

According to the photographer, the family found it therapeutic to process the loss of their favorite place by visually exposing its impact.

“When Russians destroy our favorite places, or places of our memories, they are trying to take away not only this place physically, but also our good memories of them,” Melnitchenko said.

“This family was the first of all the heroes to choose not a photo of devastation as a background, but a photo with a place of their strength and pleasant memories,” he added.

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The Kyiv IndependentElena Kalinichenko