I’m a 31 years old photographer. Born in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Currently living and working in Tel Aviv, Israel. I’m a Self-taught photographer with a background in cinema studies and graphic design.
Working as a freelance photographer, specializing mostly in portrait and reportage photography. Lately I have won the 1st prize for a series in Urban category at the Local Testimony exhibition (the Israeli counterpart to the World Press Photo).
Actually, India is where my love for photography started. I just left my cinema studies in the middle of the fourth semester and decided to spend all my money on a camera and a trip to India. I thought that I was going to be a lazy tourist. Resting and thinking about the meaning of life. I did not expect it to become a kind of a workshop. The camera did not leave my hands the whole trip. It was a new way of seeing. Of discovering. Of making contact. The whole trip quickly changed and took a new and exciting direction. Even though my style today is more refined I still look at these pictures with love. There was something pure in them. Something intuitive. Like a child discovering crayons.
So the trip evolved into this sort of compressed long lesson in composition and lighting and reacting to your surroundings. The minute you get that obsession – you’re stuck. There’s no way for you now to experience the world without a camera. It’s the photographer’s disease. And now I had it.
I traveled mostly through the north. Usually by myself. There’s no good photography near a bunch of tourists. It’s more of a wandering searcher kind of type of process. A sort of Zen-like meditation on finding beauty in unexpected places around you. And it wasn’t difficult in India – this whole country is mostly colors and textures. The challenge was in evading the banal postcard kind of pictures. It was so refreshing arriving to distant villages, outside of the tourist main trip line. The people were always so open and welcoming. Excited about some strange guy, that’s interested in photographing them. Always inviting me to their home for a meal and a chat, though they did not know one word of English. I did not know then, that in a few years, portrait photography would be my main profession.
This is also where my love for travel was born. The art of a good reportage. The freedom of disconnecting yourself from your usual and numbing surroundings. The ability to turn that trip into a photography project. To loose yourself in it. The ability to dig deep inside yourself without any distractions or down to earth worries. Training your eye to look for the rare and fleeting moments of perfect balance. Making the effort in finding out what’s unique about the way you see, about the place you’re visiting and the story that only you can tell about it. [Official Website]
