In the wreckage of a building close to the obliterated Donetsk airport, where nearby clashes continue between the Ukrainian military and Russia-backed separatists, Samuel Eder was walking and watching carefully for booby traps when a strange device caught his eye.
A corner of the wrecked Donbas building where hundreds of rolls of photographs were abandoned after war broke out in 2014.
Eder, a former photo developer, recognized the device as a darkroom enlarger, used to make prints from film. The photojournalist from Australia soon realized he was standing in the remains of a Soviet-era photo laboratory.
Samuel Eder (right) working in Ukraine.
With the permission of a Ukrainian officer escorting Eder and a friend along the front line, they began sifting through the wreckage of the long-abandoned photo lab. The pair soon uncovered thousands of negatives and color slides of life in the Donbas before the current war tore the region apart.
Some of the hundreds of rolls of Svema film, made in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, that were salvaged from the building.
Eder removed the images from the ruined building -- a move which the Australian believes was justified. He told RFE/RL if he hadn’t removed the hundreds of rolls of film to digitally scan them they would soon have decayed to nothing. “There were thousands of people who fled this town, they had to leave these memories to rot, and maybe we can help restore a little bit of what the war took away.”
Eder hopes publication of the photographs will help him to return the abandoned negatives and slides to their owners. This selection of the photos, published here for the first time, came without any information, but RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service was able to identify several locations as being in the Donbas region and Russia. Most of the photos appear to have been shot during the Soviet period.
A wedding party at the Donbas Liberators monument in Donetsk
A traditional Ukrainian singing group in Opytne. The town, which lies on the front line of the Ukrainian conflict, was once home to nearly 1,000 people.
Children dancing in Opytne. Today less than 50 people remain and almost all of the buildings have been damaged or destroyed by the fighting.
A woman lays flowers at the World War II memorial complex in Volgograd, Russia.
Most of the photos were shot with 35 mm cameras while others, like this, of a schoolgirl holding a fashionable “diplomat” suitcase, were shot with 6x6 cm medium-format cameras – an expensive rarity during the Soviet period.
Much of the celluloid film has been damaged by time and exposure to the elements.
A private (left) and sergeant in the Soviet Army, probably in the 1950s or 60s
A group portrait in front of Moscow’s Bolshoi Theater, likely in the 1970s.
A little girl being buried at an unknown location.
The Ostrava supermarket and restaurant in Volgograd, Russia. Today a bank occupies the building.
A quirky wedding photoshoot in Donetsk.
World War II veterans, possibly during a Victory Day celebration
Workers on a collective farm in the Donetsk region of Soviet Ukraine
Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery in St. Petersburg -- then known as Leningrad
A woman poses in front of the Bohdan Khmelnytsky Monument in Kyiv.
A school in the Ukrainian town of Opytne, likely during the Soviet period
The same school building in 2019, photographed by Samuel Eder.
The discovered films laid out in a Ukraine guesthouse. Eder says what is published above is "the tip of the iceberg" and tens of thousands more images remain to be scanned, which will be published on his website in the coming days.
The Australian says that anyone who recognizes themselves or their loved ones in the photographs can contact him directly.