A staircase, a window, a puddle, a shadow on the asphalt. Sometimes, for a second, they stop looking familiar — the light, the weather, the angle shifts. Those seconds are what I collect.
Chance decided a lot here, and I don't correct it. Traces of the process — the dismantled printer, the long exposure — are left as they are.
An empty beach, a dismantled printer, stripes on a hide: the familiar turning into something else before your eyes.
A resort the people have left stops being a resort. Without voices and colour, what usually serves as background remains: the shadow of leaves, the tilt of a palm, the rhythm of the awnings. The monochrome camera removes the rest, and the background becomes the subject.
With the printer taken apart, printing no longer obeys the program. The pressure of a hand, a slipped ribbon, an accidental skew — all of it stays on the print. The error is not corrected but signed: every sheet is the only one.
We are used to recognising a zebra by its stripes — here the stripes remain, but the zebra seems gone. Without heads the animals stop being animals and become a pattern, a rhyme for the bars of the enclosure. Shift the frame half a metre, and the familiar breaks into graphics.
Night pictures: asphalt underfoot, a corridor with sparse lamps. Sometimes a little light is enough to make a familiar place look different.
Asphalt no one looks at scatters into glowing grains at night. A black rectangle of shadow enters the frame almost as a Suprematist gesture — unplanned, simply the way the light fell. The city assembles its own abstraction; you only need to look down.
A passage people walk through every day without looking. Ribbed metal, sparse lamps, two figures — and a bright opening at the end. Not a metaphor, just an ordinary way home; but at the right second it looks like a way out of the dark.
Flight and stillness, carnival and empty sky: a city where silence and noise keep trading places.
The flock rises into an empty sky, while knots and ties stay on the ropes — the same size, the same silhouette. A chance rhyme no one could have staged: as if part of the flock had stayed tied down. You see it only if you stop.
In the middle of an ordinary day a disaster-movie monster looms over a school. It is only a paper figure from the Maslenitsa procession, yet the frame easily reads as an invasion: people at the windows watch and film it on their phones. For a second, festival and catastrophe are indistinguishable: an end of the world no one is afraid of.
A lone figure at the railing, the city in blue haze, sky across almost the whole frame. Nothing happens here — which is why it is worth seeing. The person stopped, and the camera stopped with them: a slowed step as the subject.
A column and its shadow — two things thousands of people walk past. At a certain hour the light assembles them into a figure found in no drawing. In effect the column works as a gnomon, the rod of a sundial: the city keeps its own time, only no one checks these clocks.
Colour returns. Lights, markings, graffiti, concrete — layers the city leaves on its surface.
The camera moves during a long exposure, and the lights of the avenue bloom above the street in red and white stems. No one planned this bouquet — headlights and streetlights drew it, and chance finished the composition: neon flowers the city draws and erases at once.
Road markings are painted for cars, not for eyes. Yet the yellow line, white triangles and the circle of a manhole form a composition in the spirit of El Lissitzky — wedge, circle, diagonal. A person's long shadow becomes one more figure no one planned.
Tiles, antennas, a balustrade — and over it all, large graffiti letters. The city writes over itself without erasing the old. Look quickly and these are just roofs; slow down and you see the layers lying one on another.
Seen from below, the bridge comes down to three things: white concrete, red cables and blue sky. In the corner, almost unnoticed, a plane passes — the only thing that moves within this geometry.
I look at a thing until it stops being a thing: the bow of a boat becomes a line, a coil of rope a colour, a shadow a sign.
The pictures stand in pairs not by place or time but by rhyme: a curve answers a curve, an arch an arch, a shadow a shadow, a branch a branch.
Single pictures that belong to neither project yet.
A metro escalator, seen from inside the descent. The handrail cuts the frame on a diagonal; on the left, passengers riding the other way blur into a single grey band, while a dark coat fills the right edge, close enough to touch. One lamp burns at the top of the tunnel. Nobody looks at the camera. The picture holds a familiar state of the commute: hundreds of people a metre apart, each sealed inside their own minute of travel.
A man passes a glass door that is still swinging. The frame tilts with it: reflections, frames and lights smear into vertical bars, and only his face and the hand raised to his ear stay readable. He looks straight back. The blur is not a defect but the subject. The door splits the picture into the instant he is in and the one he has already left.
A wall shedding its paint in plates, cracks following the old masonry joints, a single pipe dividing it in two. Above, a band of black. Raking light lifts the edge of every flake, so the surface reads like a relief map. Nothing happens here, and that is the point: time is the only actor, and the photograph records its work at the scale of a fingernail.
A whitewashed wall, a narrow doorway, a small roof above it. Low sun throws the shadow of a wrought-iron grille across the plaster in one long diagonal, so the ornament exists only as projection. The ground and sky sink into black. The building is plain; for a few minutes the light furnishes it with a decoration nobody installed.
Night, a lit shop window, a young man in a long coat and beret mid-stride, a cigarette in his hand. A lamp above him cuts a white triangle into the wall, and on the pillar a shadow seems to walk a step ahead. The window burns to pure white, the coat to pure black, and between them the figure turns almost into a graphic sign.
Night on the cobbles below the Kremlin wall. Two figures in camouflage cross the empty paving, one pointing somewhere out of frame. The towers are floodlit and monumental, the people small and quick, and the only thing in motion. A white line across the stones runs parallel to the wall, as if measuring the distance between the two scales.
A single tyre track in fresh snow, seen from directly above. The tread is pressed in perfect repetition, and loose flakes scatter around it like a star chart. With the horizon gone, scale disappears too, and an everyday mark becomes a vertical drawing, closer to a print than to a street.
Buildings at night, photographed upward into a snowstorm. Each flake becomes a short white stroke, so the sky fills with diagonal hatching while the facades go soft and dark. A few lit windows at the lower left are the only warm points. The city does not vanish in the snow; it is redrawn by it, line by line.
A park bench under fresh snow, and on it, written with a finger, the word «Дубай»: Dubai. Trampled snow in front, dark trees behind. The bench turns into a postcard addressed somewhere warm, written by someone standing in the cold. The joke lasts as long as the snow; the photograph keeps it longer.
A winter street festival. A performer in black carries a flag through a dense crowd; dozens of faces watch, many of them through raised phones. In the foreground a hand holds up one more phone, its dark screen the largest shape in the frame. The event is happening and, at the same moment, being turned into images. The photograph includes its own competitors.
A sunbed on a wooden deck, seen from above: a striped towel, an open book, a phone, an empty cup, one slipper left on the boards. The person is absent; the objects arranged around their body remain. Black and white removes the turquoise the place is known for and leaves planks, stripes and shadow. A still life of rest rather than a view of paradise.
A dark mug filled to the brim, the foam on its surface caught in side light. Bubbles of different sizes drift into a small, slow galaxy, and the rim is a bright arc against black. This close, the drink loses its name and becomes a surface: a few seconds of matter that will be gone with the next sip.
A stone surface under a patch of light that fades into darkness at the edges. With no reference point, the grain reads equally as rock, as a night sky, or as the noise of the image itself. The picture sits on the threshold where a texture stops being a thing and becomes simply light falling on particles.
A small green lizard lies flat on a worn wooden surface; a damp brown stain spreads around it like a map, with white drops of paint scattered above. Shot close, the animal comes out precise, almost enamelled, while everything else dissolves into texture. One small creature on a large, indifferent plane.
A little girl in a patterned jacket stands at a shopfront of large Chinese characters and red lacquered columns. Above her, the sign reads 遇见唐小主: “Meet the little Tang mistress.” The sun throws her shadow onto the white panel beside her, longer and stranger than she is. She studies the sign; the shadow seems to have plans of its own.
A park path under willows. A person in a Mickey Mouse costume leans over a post, the cartoon head bowed, while a woman and a man stand on either side, watching with polite uncertainty. The costume exists to be cheerful; here it has stopped working for a moment, and the three figures form a small scene with no resolution.
A red plastic basin on the grass, full of cloudy water that turns the sky into a flat, milky blue. Seen from straight above, it becomes an almost perfect circle: red ring, blue disc, green field. A dark shadow slips into the lower edge of the frame. An everyday object, reduced to three colours and one shape.
A woman on the beach, turned three-quarters from the camera. The wind throws her black hair across her face so that only red lips remain visible. Deep blue sky, white surf, a pier on the horizon. The portrait gives up its main element, the face, and shows instead the force acting on it.
A street clown sits on a stone step in front of a shop window: red wig, white face, striped trousers, a balloon in hand, eyes on a phone. Behind the glass, behind striped blinds, a dim figure stands over her. The costume is still on, the performance is paused, and for a moment the clown is just someone checking messages.
A green tractor and trailer stand in deep snow in a village, under sagging wires and a leaning pole; a white letter Z is painted on the trailer’s side. The colours are soft, almost pastel, and nothing moves. A quiet rural scene with one mark that dates it.
A brick wall painted pale and covered, brick by brick, with handwritten names and slogans: band names, «Маруся», “Russian punks not dead”, “grunge is dead”, a cross-eyed smiley. Each brick holds a separate message, and the mortar lines file them like a register. A collective archive, written without a plan by people who never met.
The underside of a concrete bridge in heavy black and white, its beams and piers repeating like a colonnade. Beyond them the river lies flat and grey. On the embankment sits a single figure, tiny against the structure, while a smooth concrete support swells in from the right. Engineering at the scale of a city, and one person at the scale of an afternoon.
BeachThe Familiar // The Other
Hand sublimationThe Familiar // The Other
ZebrasThe Familiar // The Other
CornerThe Familiar // The Other
TunnelThe Familiar // The Other
GullsThe Familiar // The Other
MantisThe Familiar // The Other
BridgeThe Familiar // The Other
ShadowThe Familiar // The Other
SkyscraperThe Familiar // The Other
MarkingsThe Familiar // The Other
Roofs of LisbonThe Familiar // The Other
Dongshuimen BridgeThe Familiar // The Other
EntranceForm and Abstraction
NicheForm and Abstraction
RippleForm and Abstraction
WindowsForm and Abstraction
WheelForm and Abstraction
BurstForm and Abstraction
PointerForm and Abstraction
LanternForm and Abstraction
SilhouetteForm and Abstraction
GlowForm and Abstraction
TrackForm and Abstraction
CrownForm and Abstraction
CoilForm and Abstraction
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Untitled (Under the Bridge)SelectedShare my admiration for the world. I do this for myself — and for you.
I train the eye to be surprised: I keep the moments when the familiar becomes something else.
Staircases, windows, puddles, the glow of advertising. Small islands of the city become knots of attention.
My hero is a random passer-by, and the city itself. I stay a detached observer; my only intervention is the choice of frame and its edges.
What I want to leave you with is a question: what am I not noticing right now?
Minimalism and the surrealism of discovery. High contrast, grain, night and dawn light. Large dominants against a wide context; emptiness as an active element.
Time and its conventions. Silence and noise. Sleep and waking. The archaeology of the city. Hope in the dark.
Gloss, staging, artificial flash, studio backdrops.
André Kertész, Gueorgui Pinkhassov, Salvador Dalí.
For prints, exhibitions and projects, write to me.