Urbanautica

SERGEY MELNITCHENKO: YOUNG AND FREE

by Steve Bisson

MYPH has become a community — a living environment that continues to grow. People join, stay, create projects, and we support them by organizing exhibitions and presenting their work at fairs and festivals. Our mission is to nurture contemporary Ukrainian photography and to present it beyond the borders of Ukraine.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Young and Free, 2017-2021

Hi Sergey, how did you start with photography, and what prompted you to pursue your authorial discourse?

Sergey Melnitchenko: I started photography quite spontaneously. I simply wanted to try something new. There is a well-known story about how it began: my grandmother bought me my first camera on the condition that I remove a tongue piercing. I was seventeen at the time, and I had pierced my tongue literally a day or two before. I agreed, took the piercing out, and she bought me a small digital camera — a Canon PowerShot SX100. I remember it very clearly.

After that, I became deeply immersed in photography. I was fascinated by the medium itself, and for the past sixteen years I have remained fully inside it. Photography gave me a sense of freedom — complete, personal freedom. I am not dependent on a single structure or employer. I have a lot of work, but I am not tied to an office. Even now, when I do quite a lot of administrative and organizational work, I still retain flexibility and autonomy.

Photography also gave me my environment: travel, encounters with new people, a strong and inspiring circle, and an enormous number of creative ideas and possibilities. In fact, everything I have today exists because of photography. What ultimately pushed me forward was a desire for the new — the urge to create something new and to represent something new through photography.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Featured Portraits, 2009-2011

I remember one of your first projects, Schwarzenegger Is My Idol. In this series, the body appears as a manifestation of aspiration, commitment, and desire. Why did you focus on this matter? And since this series is also a book, could you tell more about your approach to publishing in general?

SM: Schwarzenegger Is My Idol is, without doubt, one of the most important and canonical series in my career. It gave me a strong push forward in 2012 and became a turning point. Through this project, I discovered conceptual and art photography as a field, entered the artistic community, and began exhibiting internationally — in Europe, the United States, Argentina, and elsewhere. At that moment, it was a real breakthrough for me as an author.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Schwarzenegger Is My Idol, 2012-2013

I focused on this subject primarily because I wanted to experiment. After meeting Roman Pyatkovka — who later became my mentor, close friend, and is now a teacher at my MYPH school — he suggested that I try working with the nude genre. However, I chose a non-standard path for a heterosexual photographer and began photographing men. This decision was part of my experiment and my desire to do something different.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Schwarzenegger Is My Idol, 2012-2013

What emerged was an ironic, light, even playful series — a work about freedom, about the hunger and desire of the 1990s, about that warm, slightly naive memory of the decade and the way we reacted to our television idols and wanted to imitate them. The project was created very intuitively, guided by inner feeling, inspiration, and simple impulses. At that time, as a young artist, I was not building a complex theoretical framework. I was working instinctively, and that approach felt very honest to me.

In 2020, the series was reborn as a book, Schwarzenegger Is My Idol, published by MOKSOP (Museum of Kharkiv School of Photography). What I value most is that the book was completely reimagined by designer Kalin Kruse. Both the narrative structure and the visual rhythm were reworked, becoming more dynamic and contemporary. Eight years had passed since the series was made, and photographic trends and conventions had changed. In its original 2012 form, the project no longer functioned in the same way.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Schwarzenegger Is My Idol, 2012-2013

The book gave the series a second life. It led to new exhibitions, new acquisitions by collections, and renewed interest in the work. I am very attached to this publication because it breathed new life into the project. We used a large amount of previously unseen archival material. I gave the designer and the publisher full access to everything I had shot for the series, and much of it was presented publicly for the first time in the book.

The body is a recurring subject in your works. The series just mentioned but also in others, such as Loneliness Online, opens a crack in digital voyeurism and reveals social patterns and virtual pathologies. What did you learn from this virtual survey?

SM: I have worked very closely and extensively with the subject of the body and its manifestations in different forms — both physical and digital, virtual ones. Over time, I came to understand that the virtual body, as explored for example in the project Loneliness Online, is an extremely compelling field of research.

This topic became increasingly relevant with the digitalization of the contemporary world, and especially during the Covid period, when much of our daily life shifted online and virtual presence began to replace physical experience.

Your photographic series speaks of different approaches to both thematic investigation and exploration of the medium. What inspires your work, and how do you conceive it? Do you stick to any particular methods when developing your work?

SM: That observation is very accurate. Over the years, I have realized that the core of my practice lies in constant experimentation — with both subjects and the methods used to realize them. I enjoy changing not only my approach to the medium, but the medium itself.

I work with themes that resonate with me here and now, at a specific moment in my life. In the past, these were projects focused on the nude body or lighter, more playful series. Today, inevitably, they are connected to the full-scale war in Ukraine. There is no way to escape this reality, and I do not want to. I want to work with the themes — difficult or simple — that feel necessary to address at this precise moment.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Her, 2018

As for the media themselves, experimentation is central to my process. That is why my series often look very different from one another. I work with film, digital photography, Polaroids, Instax cameras, mobile phones, laptop cameras, action cameras — a wide range of tools. For me, these are simply different ways of translating an idea into a visual form.

What matters most is that the idea works. I am ready to reach that result through any method that feels relevant and interesting to me at the time. In recent years, I have been working extensively with medium format film, disposable film cameras, digital tools, and various combinations of media, techniques, and approaches. The result is what matters — it has to look exactly the way I envision it. It does not need to resemble my previous work. This constant shift and refusal of sameness is probably one of the things that defines me as an artist.

What about China and the works you developed there? What is your assumption? What is at stake in your visual stories?

SM: My experience in China belongs to a very specific and separate chapter of my life. It was largely detached from my usual artistic and photographic practice. While I was there, I worked with media, formats, and themes that I had almost never explored before.

The culture itself and the authenticity of the environment I was immersed in during that period — roughly between 2015 and 2017 — became a powerful source of inspiration. The projects I developed there differ radically from what I had done before and from what I created afterward.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Behind the Scenes, 2016

This experience is difficult to articulate in words. It is something that can only be felt. It reflects the states I was living through at that time — my everyday life, my surroundings, and my personal reflections on that period and the emotional conditions in which I existed.

From 2017 to 2021, you observed Ukrainian youth. What can you tell us about the intentions of this work and what you wanted to communicate?

SM: That was a wonderful period. After returning from China, I began my long-term project Young and Free. At the same time, I was also working on other series — Her, Fundamental Space Explorations of Naked Singularity, Naked Portraits in Paris, among others. But Young and Free became something particularly important to me.

It was something I deeply missed while living in China: the male nude, working with the body, and researching the male body once again. However, my approach had already shifted compared to the way I worked between 2012 and 2015, before my time in China. The focus moved toward aesthetics, visual harmony, and compositional balance.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Young and Free, 2017-2021

The project was created across different regions of Ukraine. I made a large number of photographs in lakes, rivers, fields, deserts, and forests. In different seasons, the protagonists run, jump, and experience a sense of complete freedom.

The meanings of this work changed radically after the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine. Many of these young men are now forced to fight, to defend Ukraine’s borders, sovereignty, and independence. Today, Young and Free is perceived in a completely different way.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Young and Free, 2017-2021

Moreover, some of the photographs were made in territories that are now occupied. It is unclear whether we will ever be able to return to these places. Even if they are liberated, they will likely remain heavily mined, and I am not sure that I — or the protagonists of this project — will ever be able to physically return there in our lifetime.

We live in a world where images make up the landscape and no longer represent it. Education has become a fundamental strategy for understanding the evolution of society's use, production, and perception of images. Can you tell us how the MYPH school project in Mykolayiv was born in 2018? What original purposes and responses have you obtained so far despite Covid and then today the military conflict that has upset the country?

This is actually a very interesting story. Today, together with MYPH, I find myself in a position that I never truly imagined or planned for.
In 2017, I received the Leica Oskar Barnack Award Newcomer, and about six months later I began to reflect deeply on what to do next. Mykolaiv is a relatively small city by Ukrainian standards — under 500,000 inhabitants. While it might be considered large in a European context, culturally it has always been quite limited.

In the spring of 2018, I gathered a group of almost twenty people for my first author-led course in conceptual and art photography. The course lasted only one and a half months — twelve sessions in total. Together with young and ambitious authors, we developed projects and organized an exhibition that attracted around 200 visitors. At that moment, I realized that nothing like this had existed in Mykolaiv before.

After that, I began thinking about how this initiative could evolve. In the autumn of 2018, I launched a second course and soon after formed the MYPH collective, which I started to develop more intentionally. We began producing projects and zines. In 2019, we participated in the first photobook fair in Kyiv, and from that point on, everything accelerated.
We organized exhibitions, developed both online and offline projects, and even during the Covid period we managed to sell works by our students to collections in Ukraine and across Europe. In 2021, the school gained new momentum: I restructured the program and expanded my course, making it more comprehensive and global.

With the beginning of the full-scale invasion, something shifted again — as if new energy and strength emerged from nowhere. We began working even more intensively. Each year, we realized a large number of projects, including exhibitions and participation in fairs and festivals. We updated the website, added new modules and courses, invited additional teachers, and expanded the number of lectures.

My main course now lasts seven months, almost like an academic year. We have published two books — MYPH and Conceptual Photography — with a total print run of 2,000 copies. In 2024, we launched the MYPH Photography Prize to support young photographers in Ukraine, a competition that has already taken place twice, in 2024 and 2025.

To date, we have organized more than sixty exhibitions worldwide. At the end of 2025, after an intense and productive year, we released the first issue of our bilingual photography magazine 525. It features works and texts not only by MYPH students but also by established and highly respected Ukrainian photographers. This is a periodical publication that we plan to continue developing.

"Tattoos of War," your most recent work, inevitably collides with war and, therefore, with pain. You have chosen a non-traditional documentary approach. More conceptual as you define it but also inclusive, in which the people who participate in the work are witnesses of collective memory. How did this purpose come about, and how is it taking shape?

SM: In 2023, I began working on the series Tattoos of War, using a method of image projection — projecting photographs and visual materials provided by the participants themselves onto their bodies.

In the spring of 2023, I invited a close friend of mine, a displaced person from Mykolaiv. At that time, we were both living in Ivano-Frankivsk, and I decided to experiment with this layered form. This choice was very deliberate. I am not a traditional documentary photographer in the classical sense, and I do not identify myself as a photojournalist. I work as a conceptual and art photographer.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Tattoos of War

These projection techniques allowed me to create a hybrid language — a mix of documentary and art photography. What I appreciated most about this method was, first of all, the process itself: people are required to choose the images they want to carry on their bodies, the photographs that matter most to them.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Tattoos of War

Secondly, it is about the meanings embedded in the project — the layering of memory, both personal and collective, that stays with us forever. Even when the war ends, these marks will remain: scars in the form of imprints, tattoos made of images, photographic traces. This is precisely the narrative I wanted to articulate through Tattoos of War.

Dreams, Memories and Dreams perhaps testifies to a more emotional relationship with photographic representation. Is this a more intimate series that speaks volumes about your «garden"

SM: Dreams, Memories and Dreams is, above all, a form of a photographic diary that I kept throughout 2022. At that moment, I simply could not work in any other way. The constant anxiety, the fears of war, the endless flow of news from every direction, and the complete uncertainty about what would happen tomorrow — or even in the next hour — pushed me to record life through the lens of my camera: moments of love, pain, and sadness.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Dreams, Memories and Dreams, 2022-23

The work includes images made during the first blackouts in Ukraine in November 2022. However, I cannot define it as a complete or coherent photographic series. It feels more like fragments of memory, torn out of the context of different days.

© Sergey Melnitchenko, Dreams, Memories and Dreams, 2022-23

In many ways, this is exactly how 2022 felt. It was a year of total unpredictability, instability, and disorientation. The project mirrors that condition: it is unfinished, abruptly interrupted, composed of separate photographic stories — snapshots, frames torn from a film. This is probably the most accurate way I can describe it. Even so, I allow these images to exist. They mean a great deal to me. They are fragments of memory that I would not want to relive again, no matter how painful or sad they may be.

Your project Along the Dnipro spans 13 cities, 10,000 kilometers, and dozens of personal stories shaped by displacement and war—how did traveling across so many regions influence your understanding of these individual experiences, and what common thread emerged for you while documenting them?

While documenting this project, I realized how extensive and global it truly was. It involved more than fifty interviews and more than fifty individual stories. What united all of them, without exception, was pain.

Even the stories that could be described as positive were still framed by the suffering and trauma caused by Russia’s war against Ukraine — pain inflicted on Ukrainian society as a whole. The stories were very different in nature, coming from different people and backgrounds, yet each of them affected me deeply.

With every new interview, the emotional burden became heavier. I wanted to empathize with my protagonists at all times, but it became increasingly difficult. Moral and emotional exhaustion kept accumulating, making each subsequent story harder to carry than the previous one.

Gathering thousands of photos and hours of footage, what moment or story most changed the way you see Ukraine today?

Of course, every story is individual. Each one is complex and resonates deeply with me. In fact, there are thousands of such stories across Ukraine — stories like the ones we encountered while working on this project.
The most difficult for me were the stories of military personnel who returned from captivity. In particular, the testimony of a man who spent two and a half years in captivity. What he described — what happened to him there — is truly horrifying.

Equally painful were the stories of women who lost their husbands at the front, or women whose husbands were still in captivity at the time of filming. There was also the story of a young woman who was raped by Russian soldiers during the occupation of the Zhytomyr region. All of these stories are extremely heavy — morally and physically — first and foremost for the people who lived through them.

At the same time, one of the most striking aspects of the project was witnessing how these stories evolved over time. For example, we filmed volunteers in Mykolaiv who told us that the father of a girl named Alona was being held in captivity. A few months later, he was released, went through rehabilitation, and by autumn we were filming him directly. As a result, we now have two interconnected narratives of the same person: one told through his daughter’s words while he was still in captivity, and another after his release.

In another case, we filmed a woman in Bucha who showed us her home after the occupation. Russian soldiers had lived there, set up a checkpoint, and interrogated local residents. Her husband, a civilian, was taken captive after the occupation of Bucha. And just about a year after we filmed her story, he was finally released.
Receiving such messages from our protagonists is incredibly meaningful. These moments give a sense that the emotional investment and the work behind this project were not in vain.

In Frontline Rolls, you chose to step back physically and instead give the camera to soldiers themselves—how did relinquishing control over the image change the way the war is documented, and what did the photographs, letters, and personal artifacts reveal that you could never have captured on your own?

Yes, I made a conscious decision to physically step back and hand the camera over to the soldiers. It turned out to be one of the best decisions I could have made. Today, Frontline Rolls is one of my most important and dearest projects. This is, of course, my subjective view, but I consider it one of the most serious works not only created during the full-scale war, but in my entire career. I am very grateful that I was able to carry this idea through and bring it to life.

I understood that I would never be able to document the soldiers’ daily existence in dugouts by myself. I do have a press card, and I have traveled to the front as a volunteer — to the Donetsk region while working on Along the Dnipro, as well as to Kharkiv, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Sumy regions. I do have access to frontline areas. However, I do not identify myself as a professional documentary photographer or photojournalist, and I could not physically go “to zero” — to the exact positions where soldiers live underground for months or go out on reconnaissance missions.

Through this project and by giving cameras to the soldiers, I gained access to images taken directly from their positions — from the closest possible distance to the enemy. But this was not the only goal. The core idea was to allow them to photograph the way they feel and see their reality themselves. My own eye — like that of many photographers and documentarians — is already shaped by years of visual conventions. We have our own ways of representing war.

After several years of full-scale war, we have all seen countless images of conflict. My intention was to show how the war is perceived and experienced by those who are living it every day — the soldiers themselves, the protagonists of this project. The result deeply moved and surprised me.

They did not photograph only war. In fact, they mostly photographed life: everyday routines, their friends and comrades, animals, loved ones, moments of joy. There is already more than enough fear and anxiety in their lives, so they often chose to capture moments of happiness — attempts to reclaim beauty, warmth, and humanity, even on different sections of the front line.

In Frontline Rolls, the soldiers become both subjects and authors of the images—how did giving up creative control change your understanding of authorship, and what surprised you most in what they chose to photograph and share?”

There is always this ongoing discussion about authorship: who is the author — the person who physically creates the image, or the one who initiates the idea, conceives the project, and holds its conceptual framework. It is a very important and complex question.

I feel quite comfortable in this position because I am the full conceptual initiator of the project. I clearly feel that it is my story, but at the same time, it is a story physically created with the participation of twenty-one people. And this, to me, feels absolutely right.

It is a truly collective work. For instance, a close friend helped me photograph the artifacts, I personally scanned the letters, the photographs were made by the soldiers themselves, and the book design was created by Marina Brodovska. When the book was finally published, it was crucial for me that all these stories came together in one place — with translations, biographies of the protagonists, artifacts, emotional states — forming a coherent whole.

At this point, I feel that I have created a kind of encyclopedia composed of twenty-one individual stories, and this is something I value deeply.
What surprised and moved me the most was the choice made by the participants themselves. They did not choose only images of pain or fear. On the contrary, many of the photographs are about life — about moments of joy. This became one of the most powerful discoveries of the project.

I sincerely hope that this war will end as soon as possible, and that all of them will be able to return alive, safe, and healthy to their families and loved ones.

Sergey Melnitchenko (website)

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