Photographer Dmitry Markov’s final post on Instagram, filed from the town of Alexandrov in Russia’s Vladimir Region
We met Andrei when we were walking in Alexandrov’s bedroom district. He had gone out to get a bottle of vodka from a taxi driver and bumped into us on the narrow snow-covered path at the entrance to his two-storey apartment building.
“You should stop digging for drug stashes here, there’s nothing to find.”
We explained that we were tourists and asked whether we could visit his house. It transpired that Andrei had come home from the special military operation but was planning to go back. He was a drinker. He offered us buckwheat, sausages and tea and told us we couldn’t say no. First he took care of us. He heated the food, boiled water, and served us a simple lunch. Only then did he sit down, open the bottle, and pour himself some vodka.
People ask how things are going for me on the professional/international front. My answer: nowhere fast. For two reasons.
Firstly, the clusterfuck in which “our village” (c) has become entangled, imposes certain restrictions. By working with foreign galleries and submitting works for international awards, I risk getting branded a “foreign agent.” You can’t explain to the comrade major from the secret services that France is the birthplace of photography, and that the photo fair at the Grand Palais in Paris is the most important event in the world. It’s not even the status of “foreign agent” as such that scares me, but the possible consequences for the people and organizations with whom I work.
Let’s be realistic, though: if they want to brand me a “foreign agent,” they’ll do it all the fucking same, so let’s move on to the second, more important reason.
Publications, exhibitions, and awards abroad put plenty of wind in your sails and boost your self-esteem. I am grateful to destiny for every such encounter on my professional journey. It was an important stage in my work, but I think I’m past it. International recognition is cool, but it still doesn’t compare to being liked and understood at home. Seriously: when people come up to you on the street to shake your hand, it’s worth a lot.
A connoisseur can correctly break down a creator and their work, but in order to fully experience what was happening at the time a photo was shot, you need a personal context. Roughly speaking, to appreciate the beauty of a picture taken in a bedroom district, I would argue that you have to live in a bedroom district. My social media stats show that the majority of my subscribers are Russian nationals in their thirties and forties, that is, people with the same background and cultural code as me. Eight out of ten of these people have nothing to do with photography, and these are probably the most valuable viewers, since I had the honor to introduce them to documentary photography.
When a stranger says that my photos rhyme with their feelings and memories, I experience (how should I put it?) a connection with something greater. This is probably the miracle of art: a moment in life that lasts one thirtieth of a second enables strangers to understand something fundamentally vital about each other. Ultimately, these pictures are mine as much as they also belong to each of the people who caught sight of something personal in them. Maybe not everyone will be able to appreciate my compositional techniques and artistic devices, but fuck them. They are just tools for conveying a message, and the message is the only thing that matters.
The simplest and, simultaneously, the most difficult thing is to understand your time, your place, and your metier. It seems I have succeeded in doing this: my photos get attention, and my books sell so well that every year I have to reprint them. So I just want to keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I can—here.
P.S. By the way, whereas earlier, according to my stats on (extremist) Instagram, Paris was in third place, after Moscow and Petersburg, in terms of numbers of followers, nowadays Chelyabinsk is in third place! This is definitely a sign of success.
Source: Marina Varchenko (Facebook), 3 July 2023: “A downpour on Ligovka.” Ihave spent so much time on “Ligovka,” i.e., Ligovsky Prospekt, and on the corner pictured here in particular, that I’m nearly sure it’s permanently imprinted on my brain. I’ve probably been in more than one summertime evening downpour on that very same corner. ||| TRR
Someone wrote in the comments: “I get the impression that Dmitry is sitting near the same five-storey apartment block [pyatietazhka] and photographing life in the vicinity.” Existentially, that’s how it is, and so when I geotag a post I feel I’m doing something that is somewhat meaningless, as if a Khrushchev-era apartment block [khrushchevka] in Ladoga were fundamentally different in some way from a Khrushchev-era apartment block in Petrozavodsk.
Nevertheless, the Soviet neighborhoods with their endless labyrinths of prefab blocks of flats and bricks are the most interesting and beautiful things in a city. [On the contrary,] I enjoy going to museums and fortresses about as much as I enjoy going to a municipal outpatient clinic.
I would like to paraphrase a quote by an artist,* although he is probably the last artist whose quotes I would like to paraphrase—Warhol: “Five-storey apartment blocks are the most beautiful things in Russia. Five-storey apartment blocks are the most beautiful things in Belarus. Five-storey apartment blocks are the most beautiful things in Kazakhstan. There is nothing beautiful in Beijing and New York.”
* [“The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald’s. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald’s. Peking and Moscow don’t have anything beautiful yet.”]
Friends, I don’t answer questions about shooting and processing, not because I keep this knowledge secret, but because the very wording of the question don’t entail a substantive answer. How do I get people’s consent? In different ways. How do I process shots? Manually.
Many people think there is some kind of universal life hack—a script for talking to people, a filter for processing photos, etc.—that will solve the problem. It is excusable for youngsters who grew up on TikTok and other shit to think this way, but we adults should realize that things are more complicated. And supposing that quality is determined by equipment is like believing that a properly selected frying pan is the key to being awarded Michelin stars.
I used to think that this desire for quick results was a peculiarity of young people, but my psychotherapist friends, for example, face the same situation, although their clients are no longer teenagers. Apparently, it is human nature to cut corners and look for a panacea.
You can get experience in communicating with people only by doing it. And in this case it is also difficult to give advice because everyone has their own patterns of behavior—at first. Some [photographers] get the consent [of the people they’re shooting], some shoot brazenly, some shoot secretly, etc. Situations are different too: in some places it’s enough to shoot once, on the fly, while in others you have to get to know your subjects. Being able to predict which strategy will be most effective in which case and will give the best result is a tour de force, I think. And this comes with experience.
P.S. By the way, shooting secretly is no solution at all—any street photographer will tell you that when shooting covertly, the photographer has such an anxious and telltale kisser that it would be better if he shot openly.
“’What I like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.’ Karl Lagerfeld, German fashion designer and photographer.”
Source: Dmitry Markov, Facebook, 3 January 2022. I found the original text of the Lagerfeld quotation on Goodreads. ||| TRR
The origins of the town of Vorkuta are associated with Vorkutlag, one of the most notorious forced-labour camps of the Gulag. Vorkutlag was established in 1932 with the start of mining. It was the largest of the Gulag camps in European Russia and served as the administrative centre for a large number of smaller camps and subcamps, among them Kotlas, Pechora, and Izhma (modern Sosnogorsk). The Vorkuta uprising, a major rebellion by the camp inmates, occurred in 1953.
In 1941 Vorkuta and the labour camp system based around it were connected to the rest of the world by a prisoner-built rail line linking Konosha, Kotlas, and the camps of Inta. Town status was granted to Vorkuta on November 26, 1943.
On August 28, 1946, the amazing Lev Shcheglov was born in Petersburg. Alas, in December 2020, the damn covid took him away. We remember him. How could we forget him? He was the only one like him.
A quote from Dmitry Bykov’s conversation with Lev Shcheglov in 2018: “But look at the faces everyone makes when they look at each other — on public transport, behind the wheel, just walking down street! Look at what a weighty mass of irritation hangs over every city: Moscow and Petersburg in this sense are no better than any impoverished provincial town. This mass of malice — which is completely gratuitous, by the way — puts pressure on everyone and demands to be let out.”
Source: Marina Varchenko, Facebook, 28 August 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader
Source: Zhenya Oliinyk (@evilpinkpics), Instagram, 15 April 2022. Thanks to Bosla Arts for the heads-up. I took the liberty of cropping the seven panels of Ms. Oliinyk’s original message (which I very much took to heart) and stacking them into a single image/text.
Diana and Lena
The group Ranetki, moving to Argentina and the birth of a child — everything about this news story is terrific.
The series Ranetki provided the soundtrack to our youth, but that is a thing of the past. The news is that From the new: Lena Tretyakova (who played the bass guitarist [in the show’s eponymous pop-rock band]) has left Russia for Argentina and become a mother.
Lena recently told her subscribers that she had legalized her relationship with her girlfriend Diana. They got married in Argentina, where their son Lionel was born.
Now Lena is joking about motherhood on her Instagram and sharing photos of her family, and this is such a sweet thing, we tell you!
Source: Side by Side LGBT Film Festival, Facebook, 24 August 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader
In the six months since Russia invaded, the state media’s emphasis in reporting the war has gradually shifted. Gone are predictions of a lightning offensive that would obliterate Ukraine. There is less talk of being embraced as liberators who must “denazify” and demilitarize Ukraine, though the “fascist” label is still flung about with abandon.
Instead, in the Kremlin version — the only one most Russians see, with all others outlawed — the battlefields of Ukraine are one facet of a wider civilizational war being waged against Russia.
The reporting is less about Ukraine than “about opposing Western plans to get control of Mother Russia,” said Stanislav Kucher, a veteran Russian television host now consulting on a project to get Russians better access to banned news outlets.
On state media, Russia is a pillar of traditional values, bound to prevail over the moral swamp that is the West. But the extent of Russia’s staggering casualties in Ukraine remains veiled; only the Ukrainian military suffers extensive losses.
State television has played down the mounting Ukrainian attacks on the strategically and symbolically important Crimean peninsula, but the images on social media of antiaircraft fire erupting over Crimea began to put domestic political pressure on the Kremlin.
The visceral reality of the war, especially the fact that Russian-claimed territory was not immune, was brought home both by the strikes on Crimea and by what investigators called a premeditated assassination in Moscow.
[…]
Glimpses of the war’s cost, however, remain the exception, as news and talk shows have branched into myriad economic and social topics to try to hammer home the idea that Russia is locked in a broad conflict with the West.
Lev Gudkov, the research director at the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, said the government explains European and American hostility by saying that “Russia is getting stronger and that is why the West is trying to get in Russia’s way,” part of a general rhetorical line he described as “blatant lies and demagogy.”
As state television stokes confrontation, the talk show warriors are getting “angrier and more aggressive,” said Ilya Shepelin, who broadcasts a Russian press review on YouTube for the opposition organization founded by the imprisoned Kremlin critic Aleksei A. Navalny.
Rediscovering Russia We have prepared a great guide to our country. We introduce you to amazing people who are not afraid to make discoveries, launch small-scale manufacturing companies, and fly airplanes. We tell success stories and inspire you to travel.
A female pilot of a Boeing 777 aircraft about her work Pilot Svetlana Slegtina told us about her path to the profession and the difficulties she has had to face during her studies and work. Read the interview
Who makes cool shoes in Russia From leather shoes to sneakers made from eco-friendly materials. Discover
What to show children in Moscow: rare places We have compiled a list of interesting and free places Show
Quilted jackets from Russian manufacturers We selected 10 different models. Look
Source: Excerpt from a 29 August 2022 email advertising circular from Ozon, a major Russian online retailer. Translated by the Russian Reader
I have a friend named Lyosha. He lives an ordinary inconspicuous life, but his past terrifies not only the respectable citizens, but also the petty criminals in our glorious city. Lech has managed to gain a bad reputation even among the Narcotics Anonymous community, which preaches open-mindedness as one of its principles. I can’t remember how many times they have stopped me on the street or taken me aside at a meeting and said: “Do you even know who Lyokha is and what he’s capable of? Do you know the things he’s done?”
Yes, I knew what Lyokha had done and how he had done it — mostly from Lyokha himself. We had often sat in my kitchen (not very sober, but very cheerful), and Alexei had entertained me with yet another tall tale about how he had gone visiting and left in someone else’s expensive sneakers. I was won over by the fact that Lyosha did not allow himself to do anything like that to me, and even if I was no pushover myself, Alexei’s skill in duping those around him reached heights only the snow caps of the seven mountain peaks exceeded. Once he was taken to rehab, and the cops came after him and tried to reason with the management of the place. “Do you have any clue who you taken in?” they said. “He’s a stone-cold crook who will burgle your entire place in a single evening.”
Basically, despite his past, I have remained very close to Lyosha. Moreover, when a fucking ugly overdose happened, and an ordinary junkie would most likely have walked away from his dormant co-user, Alexei belabored himself with my body, keeping me as conscious as possible until the ambulance arrived, after which he lay down for the night in the next room and every half hour pounded on the wall shouting, “Dimarik, are you alive in there?”
So, he is my friend, and I feel a certain obligation towards him. And it has nothing to do with that fucking “a life for a life” romanticism and all that stuff… Lyokha is my friend because by his example he shows me that changes happen. That you can become a different person, even if previously your own mother said to her only son: “Lord, would that you’d make it snappy and die! You’d stop tormenting me, and you’d suffer less yourself.”
Nevertheless, years of prison and severe drug addiction take their toll even on the hardiest. Therefore, it is especially important to me that Lyokha is alive and stays close. After all, if he succeeded, maybe sooner or later, I will succeed…
P.S. I forgot to explain the context: Lyosha saved me from an overdose last week.
Source: Dmitry Markov, Facebook, 27 August 2022. Dmitry Markov is a world-renowned photographer who lives in Pskov. Translated by the Russian Reader
I’m not sure what you get if you place the winning bid on this photograph by the fantastic Pskov photographer Dmitry Markov. (An NTF? A .jpeg file? A real print?) It should be in a museum. Source: OpenSea
⊕ ⊗ ⊕ ⊗ ⊕
Revolt Pimenov:
A quote about the first months of a certain war:
“I tried to read in the faces of the thousands what was in their minds this Easter day. But their faces looked blank. Obviously they do not like the war, but they will do what they’re told. Die, for instance.”
Perhaps worth noting: Putin hasn't personally commented on Ukraine since Dec. 23. His annual Tatiana's Day Q&A with students came and went today without a question on current events. Last year, one of the students asked him about his purported Black Sea palace.
It strikes me of note (not that this has any bearing or reflection on Putin's actual decision making) that there's very little sense in Moscow of people having any idea or interest in fact that their country may be days away from launching a devastating invasion of a neighbor
My dear Ukrainian friends! I want to express my support to you in connection with numerous reports about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. You should know that the vast majority of my friends in the art profession are not only against such aggressive behavior, but also strongly condemn it. We see that by increasing its military presence on the border, the Kremlin hopes to intimidate Ukraine and push Europe. This gang of people in power has long ago lost all sense of decent behavior, having completely turned into goons in terms of their mindset. The only deterrent for them is a united stance by the western countries on this issue. I really hope that after seeing this unity, they will crawl back to their lair, not daring to unleash hostilities. In any case, please accept my words of support and know that there are a lot of people in Russia who have not supported and are not going to support this government and its insane aggressive ambitions.
Translated by the Russian Reader
Update (28 January 2022):
The Pig Hut, as this exhibit is known, is the work of Rosemarie Trockel and Carsten Höller, and they, like Herr Weinberger, have an explanation for this work. Pigs and humans have similar nervous systems, they say, so they probably feel the same things. The stream has no way to know the psychomedical part of the reasoning. It approaches under the auspices of art and so it recognizes the pigs as readymades: humble, ordinary objects imported into this festively aesthetic space and thus invested with the condition of “art” by the mere fact of occupying its domain. By the same token, of course, the reflection in the glass renders the visitors themselves into readymades, making the corrupted stream even dirtier as it flows on toward the first of Documenta’s official buildings, Kassel’s Fridericianum.
Photographer Dmitry Markov with his viral photograph. Courtesy of his Facebook page
Dmitry Markov Is Auctioning Off His Photo from a Moscow Police Precinct in Support of OVD Info and Apologia for Protest Takie Dela
February 6, 2021
Photographer Dmitry Markov has announced a charity auction on his Facebook page. He is selling a print of the photograph that he posted on February 2 from a police precinct in Moscow. Markov will divide the proceeds equally and send them to the civil rights organizations OVD Info and Apologia for Protest.
The photographer set the starting price for the snapshot at 10 thousand rubles. Bids of 100 and 200 thousand rubles were made in comments to his post. The auction ends on at 12:00 p.m. Moscow time [GMT +3] on February 7. [As of 9:15 p.m. Moscow time on February 6, the highest bid for the print was 850,000 rubles, which is approximately 9,500 euros.]
In the photo, a uniformed security forces officer sits with a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin on the wall behind him. It has been dubbed a symbol of early 2021 and generated numerous memes. Markov toldTakie Dela that he “would like there to be other symbols.”
On February 2, Markov was detained at a rally protesting the trial of the politician Alexei Navalny in Moscow. The photographer said that he did not take his press credentials along because he had gone to the rally “of [his] own accord.” Markov was released from the police precinct on the evening of the same day, charged with involvement in an unauthorized rally.
Over a thousand people were detained at the February 2 protest rally in Moscow. Takie Delacovered the rally live online.
UPDATE. Markov sold the only authorized print of his iconic snapshot for 2 million rubles (a little over 22,000 euros). This money will be of tremendous help to OVD Info and Apologia for Protest as they continue to fight the good fight in these dark times.
Thanks to my long-term employment in one organization, I traveled all over Northwest Russia. Going to provincial cities and meeting local social activists was the most inspiring part of the job. When I returned from such business trips, I would tell everyone about the wonderful people I met there and say that they saw everything that was happening around them much more clearly than those who lived in the capitals. In every provincial city, there was always a person who loved their town incredibly, knew everything about it, knew everyone, and did everything they could to make life in that town better.
Or rather, they were trying to keep those towns and villages alive and save what they and the rest of the inhabitants knew and loved from destruction. They wanted to stop the demolition of old houses, the cutting down of forests, and the closing of schools, hospitals, and clinics, because without all this, their hometowns were doomed to extinction. There was nothing “provincial” about these people, and, most importantly, they were not complacent, unlike, distressingly, so among many activists in the capitals. And what the activists in the provinces said was a hundred times more interesting, original and subtle than what I heard from their colleagues in the capitals, who were always in the limelight and knew how and what to say to make the right impression. It seemed to me that it was the regional activists who, inconspicuously but firmly, were saving my country from complete degradation.
I liked going to Pskov most of all. There, many years ago, I met and then became friends with several wonderful people. I always felt sorry that almost no one I knew at home in Petersburg understood why I admired these trips and these people so much. I had nothing to show them, and I didn’t know how to explain my feelings.
Although I had heard about Yuri Dud, I hadn’t watched any of his videos and didn’t want to know anything about him until he made a video about the HIV epidemic in Russia. My friends who help people with HIV said that this film alone has done more to raise awareness than all previous public education campaigns combined. So I watched Dud’s latest film, because I had heard about the Pskov photographer Dmitry Markov. It turns out that Dmitri Markov is even cooler than I had thought, and that I had seriously underestimated Dud.
The film contains everything that I have seen many times with my own eyes, but could not describe: “simple” people who are amazing in their complexity, people completely ignored by the smart set in the capitals. How is it, for example, that young people who were abandoned as children by alcoholic parents and seemingly have known nothing in their lives but a provincial orphanage and the army actually understand everything that needs to be understood about the world around them much better than many of their peers who grew up in well-off families in Petersburg and Moscow?
Valentina Koganzon
Markov: Life in the Russian Provinces / vDud
15,189,896 views • Nov 18, 2020 • In Russian, with English subtitles
0:00 What is this episode about?
1:16 Why does Markov photograph Russia the way he does?
4:52 Who smartened Dud up a bit?
9:04 Why did we meet Markov in rehab?
15:46 The creepy realization that you’re a drug addict
20:24 Workshops for the mentally disabled
23:25 “Mom left me at the Three Stations”
28:18 Leaving Moscow for Pskov and a salary five times less
33:15 The main problem in the Russian provinces: version #1
37:55 A Russian bogatyr in 2020
41:30 Don’t try this at home
44:06 The main problem in the Russian provinces: version #2
45:26 “Moscow is distant and different”
49:00 How much do you earn?
53:45 Why do we need independent media?
1:00:06 Russia’s best photographer
1:02:03 A region where the 90s never ended
1:06:58 What are Russian orphanages like?
1:11:22 Lyokha and Dasha
1:17:37 The main problem in orphanages
1:24:23 An important argument worth several million eyes
1:27:37 Why does Russia booze it up?
1:30:59 From being a paratrooper fighting in hotspots to helping the homeless
1:33:30 “I was in prison 6 times for a total of 19 and a half years”
1:35:03 How do people get into the Kostroma Night Shelter for the homeless?
1:38:38 A Russian star is born
1:40:07 “I fought for our side, for Donbas”
1:45:01 “If everyone thinks that there are no problems, you might believe it yourself”
1:46:45 Help for the Russian provinces from an unexpected country
1:51:10 How realtors swindle orphanage kids
1:55:12 Do you believe in God?
1:56:51 Dud’s new hairstyle
2:04:04 What does Markov dream of?
2:07:21 What has happened to the stars of this episode since we filmed it
Translated by the Russian Reader
“Pupils at the correctional boarding school in Khilok, involved in the attack on the police station. The children are facing the courtyard of the boarding school, an old Soviet building without running water and sewerage.” Photograph by Dmitry Markov, originally published by Takie Dela in February 2016. Markov mentions the attack on the police station in his interview with Yuri Dud, above
The Russian Reader 