WE HAVE ALL MET A YOUNG MAN LIKE DANIEL MELNYK, this open-faced, sunny 21-year-old with a broad grin. As soon as he walks into the studio, in a former factory in Lviv in western Ukraine, the chat and jokes begin. Melnyk is used to being here. He has been photographed several times by the artist Marta Syrko. But he’s less used to having an audience in the room. As soon as everyone has introduced themselves, he and Syrko get to work. First, he pulls off his sweatshirt and trousers, revealing the heavily tattooed body of a young soldier. Then he removes his prosthetic legs: he has had two below-the-knee amputations. His left arm ends at the wrist. He has only the middle finger and thumb of his right hand.
Syrko has asked him to position himself on a sheet of reflective metal. She surveys him from different angles, suggesting adjustments to his pose. At one point, she photographs him through a mirror – the resulting images will have a mysterious, slightly subaqueous feel. Julia Kochetova, the Observer photographer, darts around, capturing the whole process. Throughout, the conversation flows. Melnyk teases Syrko: “You’re like my teacher at school. But I can’t sit still!”
Syrko’s artistic focus has long been on the human body – “athletes’ bodies, older people’s bodies, thinking about the way the body holds experience”. She has worked with subjects with Down’s syndrome, and with her elderly grandparents, whom she has photographed nude: she makes portraits with a physical frankness that is unusual in socially conservative, religious western Ukraine. In November last year, she was in France for the annual Paris Photo art fair when she visited the Louvre and, the mutilated ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, a fresh project began to take shape in her mind. “The hardest thing,” she says, “was to find the first hero willing to be photographed – and then the next hardest thing was to explain that they were going to have to be naked, with their scars, with everything that had happened to them.”
