About
Photography found me the way most meaningful things do: not all at once, but through years of quiet fascination with people and the spaces they inhabit.
I grew up in a closed military town on the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia's far east. Concrete buildings, restricted borders, not much to look at. But just beyond the town: volcanoes, black sand, hills that vanished into fog. I spent a lot of time looking out. I think that's where the habit started.
I moved to St. Petersburg to study book illustration, after six years of art school before that. Roughly twelve years of drawing, composition, and learning to tell stories inside a frame. But by the end of my studies I knew I didn't want to be locked in a workshop. I wanted to travel and see things. Around that time I picked up my first camera, a Canon EOS 750 film camera, and that was it.
My first years behind a camera were spent photographing weddings, learning to read emotion in real time, anticipating moments before they happen. That foundation led me to corporate work, where I learned to bring intention and structure to every frame. Over more than a decade, the work kept evolving, and so did I, moving gradually toward the kind of images I care about most: portraits with narrative depth, built with the same attention as a painting or a film still.
I think in stories before I think in photographs. A session with me often starts weeks before the camera comes out. I research, I sketch, I source objects that might seem strange until you see them in the final frame. Whether we're working in my Zürich studio or on a location that becomes part of your story, every image is built around who you are and who you're becoming.
The people I work with tend to care deeply about aesthetics and intention. They choose to work with me because they want a collaborator, not just a photographer.
What I've learned over the years is that the session itself matters as much as the final images. When it's done right, something shifts. You walk in with an idea of who you are, and you leave having discovered something you didn't expect. That experience, the one we share together, is what stays with both of us long after the images are delivered.
If that resonates, I'd love to hear what you're envisioning.