This week, a story surfaced in my Pixelfetch feed about a man named Igor Polyakov who is hand-making photographic film in a village outside Lviv, Ukraine. (Yes, I read my own site to keep up with photography news. That’s sort of the point of building it.) Not repacking existing stock. Making it. From scratch. He sources the silver, mixes the gelatin and chemicals, and coats the film base one strip at a time under a red safelight. An orthochromatic emulsion with high silver content, made in batches of exactly 20 rolls per month, alongside his collaborator Vitalii Kovalyshyn.
The film sits at around ISO 20. It renders deep, lush tonal shades that reviewers say rival commercial stock. Mark Osterman, a Rochester-based emulsion artist who is one of perhaps two people on the planet doing this kind of work independently, was so impressed by Polyakov’s results that he requested a Zoom call just to understand the process.
Getting an emulsion to adhere evenly to a film base is, according to Polyakov, the hardest part of the entire process. Not sourcing the materials. Not the chemistry. For a long time the layers kept separating. His solution uses two emulsion layers: one that bonds to the base, and the imaging emulsion on top. This is nineteenth-century craft, rediscovered by hand, in a country under invasion.
Polyakov and Kovalyshyn are doing this while a war is happening around them. That alone would be remarkable. But what got me was the quality. This isn’t a novelty. Experienced film photographers are looking at the results and struggling to believe they came from a home setup.
I watched the video twice, ordered four rolls, and then started asking a question I should have asked a long time ago: who else in the photography world is Ukrainian, and quietly making extraordinary things while the headlines are about everything else?
The answer was a much longer list than I expected.
The Film Is the Heart of This
Let me stay with Polyakov and Kovalyshyn for a moment, because they’re the reason this essay exists.
There are perhaps two people on earth making photographic film emulsion by hand, independently, in their own labs. One is Mark Osterman in Rochester, a process historian at the George Eastman Museum. The other is in a village outside Lviv, doing it in the middle of a war, and selling rolls for about $20 each in batches of twenty a month.
Think about the economics of that. Twenty rolls a month. At $20 a roll, that’s $400 of revenue a month from an extraordinarily labour-intensive craft. Nobody does this to get rich. They do it because they love the medium, and because making something permanent and beautiful is its own kind of resistance when everything around you is trying to destroy.
You can support them directly. They have a Patreon under the name Polyfilm, the project is documented in Ari Jaaksi’s video on YouTube, and you can follow the makers on Instagram at @igor_polyakov_ and @vkovalyshyn. I’ve ordered four rolls. More on that at the end.
But here’s what struck me once I started looking. Polyakov and Kovalyshyn aren’t an isolated curiosity. They’re part of a much deeper Ukrainian photography world that most of us use, admire, or benefit from without ever thinking about where it comes from.
The Software (You Might Already Know This One)
Luminar Neo. Aurora HDR. If you use either, there’s a decent chance you already know the company behind them is Ukrainian. But it’s worth saying anyway.
Skylum, the company behind Luminar, was founded as Macphun in Kyiv in 2008 by two game developers and amateur photographers, Dmitry Sytnik and Paul Muzok. Luminar Neo has won multiple awards and is used by photographers worldwide. The core development team is still in Kyiv.
When the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, the team scattered across Ukraine and beyond. Some moved to safer regions. Some worked from air raid shelters. But they kept shipping software. While their city was under threat, they released Luminar Neo and kept developing it. Team members donate to the armed forces, volunteer in territorial defence, and then sit down and write photo editing code.
Recently Skylum released Aperty, a portrait retouching tool that processes up to 4,000 facial points using face mesh technology. As someone building photography tools that use MediaPipe face mesh for expression analysis, I can tell you that’s serious computational work. Being done by a team that has spent three years working through a war.
The Last Camera Maker in Ukraine
ARAX is based in Kyiv. Run by Gevorg Vartanyan, it is the only remaining camera manufacturer in Ukraine. Since around 2002, ARAX has produced upgraded versions of the classic Kiev-Arsenal 60 and Kiev-Arsenal 88 medium format cameras, handbuilt and hand-tested.
When the invasion started, ARAX’s production facilities hadn’t been damaged, but the company lost 100% of its income. Production is paused. Vartanyan is waiting for peace to resume building cameras.
ARAX has a donation link on their website. You can also buy accessories and parts that are still in stock. Every purchase supports a craftsman who is one of the last people on earth hand-building medium format film cameras.
The Photographers Who Haven’t Left
Vladyslav Krasnoshchok is a surgeon in Kharkiv. He’s also one of Ukraine’s most important working photographers. He shoots on film. He documents the war from the front lines, the hospitals, and the streets of a city that has been under constant bombardment for over three years.
His book, “Documentation of the War,” published by Red Hook Editions, covers the period from 2022 to 2025. He develops his film in his kitchen, which doubles as his darkroom. He describes his work like a tree: “The trunk is photography. The branches are everything else: murals, paintings, collages, sculpture, linocuts. When I’ve done what I needed with a branch, I return to the trunk.”
He’s still in Kharkiv. He’s still shooting.
Then there’s the Fotovramci project. A photography company sent 25 disposable Fujifilm cameras to soldiers on different fronts across Ukraine. Each soldier was asked to capture whatever they wanted: their routines, their work, their silences, their landscapes. When the cameras came back, they returned with handwritten letters and fragments of memory that no embedded journalist could have captured.
Boris Mikhailov, one of Ukraine’s most celebrated photographers, recently exhibited at The Photographers’ Gallery in London. His work spans decades and captures Ukraine’s identity from the Soviet era through to the present.
These aren’t photographers waiting for the war to end so they can work. They’re working now. Under conditions most of us can’t imagine.
A Century of Photographic Heritage
What struck me most in researching this essay is how deep Ukraine’s contribution to photography actually runs.
Svema, based in Shostka, was founded in 1931 as a major manufacturer of photographic film and magnetic tape. For decades, it supplied film across the Soviet Union. The brand is gone now, but the manufacturing knowledge and photographic culture it created lives on in the people still working in Ukraine’s imaging industry.
The Kiev/Arsenal factory in Kyiv produced cameras for decades. Kiev rangefinders, medium format bodies, cine cameras. The lenses were based on Carl Zeiss Jena designs and are still prized by film photographers today for their optical quality.
The Kharkiv School of Photography is one of the most important documentary photography movements in Eastern European history. Photographers like Boris Mikhailov and the collective that formed around him in the 1970s challenged Soviet photographic orthodoxy and created a tradition of raw, honest, confrontational image-making that continues today.
Ukraine didn’t just contribute to photography. It built cameras, manufactured film, developed software, and produced some of the most important documentary photographers of the last fifty years. That heritage is under direct threat. And most of the photography world doesn’t know it.
How to Support Ukrainian Photography Creators
This is the practical section. If any of this resonated, here’s where your money and attention can go.
Support the film makers. Polyakov and Kovalyshyn sell their handmade orthochromatic film in small batches of around 20 rolls a month at roughly $20 a roll. Support them directly through their Patreon (under the name Polyfilm), watch Ari Jaaksi’s video for the full story, and follow them on Instagram at @igor_po
lyakov_ and @vkovalyshyn. This is the one I’d start with.
Buy their software. Skylum’s Luminar Neo is a genuine Lightroom alternative. Every licence supports a Kyiv-based team that’s been developing through a war. skylum.com
Support ARAX. Ukraine’s last camera manufacturer has a donation link and accessories still available for purchase. araxfoto.com
Buy the book. Vladyslav Krasnoshchok’s “Documentation of the War” is published by Red Hook Editions. It’s a visual record of what’s happening in Ukraine right now, shot on film, by a surgeon who picks up a camera between shifts.
Follow the work. UNITED24 Media publishes extraordinary photojournalism from Ukrainian photographers. The Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers maintains a platform at ukrainianphotographers.com with opportunities, grants, and exhibitions.
Follow the Kharkiv School. The five-part documentary series Kharkiv: Capital of Alternative Photography is available on YouTube via ARTE.tv Culture, each episode covering one decade of the movement. It’s the best introduction to Ukraine’s photographic tradition that exists.
Four Rolls
I started this essay because a man in a village outside Lviv is hand-making film during a war. I ended it realising that a software company I already use, a camera manufacturer I’d vaguely heard of, and a documentary photography tradition I deeply admire are all Ukrainian.
The photography industry talks a lot about supporting each other. Here’s a concrete way to do it. Buy the software. Buy the film. Buy the book. Follow the work.
I’ve ordered four rolls of Polyakov’s orthochromatic film. It’s medium format, so when it arrives I’ll load a roll into my Super Fujica Six, and maybe into my grandfather’s 1930s Agfa, and see what this emulsion can do. Handmade Ukrainian film, shot on a camera older than the war that’s threatening to end it. I’ll share the results here.
In the meantime, if you know of other Ukrainian photography creators, makers, or tools I’ve missed, I’d love to hear about them.
Alex Kesselaar is a photographer and drone operator based in Sydney. He runs Kess Media for government and infrastructure clients, and builds photography tools at Pixelfetch.
Great article Alex! I can’t wait to see those photos from that film. It takes me back to old times in dark rooms with the smell of the chemical baths. Watching the magic of pictures appearing as they hung from pegs on string. It’s mind blowing to think of the skill to create the film itself…and then add a war zone to that…and the defiance of creating beauty from destruction 💛
I remember purchasing Luminar Neo for Lilly back in the early days of the war, at your recommendation. Reading Skylum’s emails was so inspiring. Such a brave, innovative company. Keep writing, you have a great style, it’s clear and compelling - a pleasure to read 😁