J. Lester Feder’s *The Queer Face of War: Portraits and Stories from Ukraine* asks its readers to look twice at the same person. First comes the portrait — frontal, unhurried, made by a photographer who is also the reporter in the room. Then comes the story: how the sitter came to be in uniform, in a shelter, or at a demonstration, and what the war has taken from them. Verlag Kettler publishes the book in a single hardcover volume of 144 pages, in English.
Queer experience of war has mostly gone unrecorded, and the reason is plain. Many recent conflicts have been fought in countries where being out is dangerous, so the people living through them have kept quiet. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is different. Queer Ukrainians have joined the defence of their country openly and have kept pressing for civil rights at the same time; the two struggles are difficult to separate. Vladimir Putin has partly framed the war as a defence of “traditional values”, which lends the invasion an explicitly anti-LGBTQ purpose — an alignment that photographs of this kind have rarely had the chance to record.
Feder moves between image and text without letting either do the other’s work. Portraits give individual faces a scale that reportage often flattens; the profiles restore context a single frame cannot carry. Subjects appear at their most exposed and at their most determined, and the sequence holds both without resolving the tension between them.
Because the book was made while the war continued, it reads as a document from inside the event rather than a summary of it. For a collector, the interest lies in that position: an English-language hardcover from a German art-book publisher, recording a shift in who a national defence is understood to include. It belongs with serious photographic accounts of contemporary conflict, not as a monument to a finished history but as evidence gathered while the question was still open.
