Dmitry Markov was a Russian phenomenon, a wide-eyed photographer, a meteor who took over Instagram with all his sensitivity, with all his violence in the face of the reality of life on the borders of Russia.
Born in 1982 in Pushkino, near Saint Petersburg, he became famous in his country thanks to social networks.
On February 2, 2021, he was arrested near the Moscow Courthouse where he came to support dissident Alexeï Navalny.
The still amateur photographer was taken to the Kosino-Ukhtomsky police station where he took a photo with his phone of a hooded security guard, sitting under the overwhelming portrait of Vladimir Putin.
While waiting to be questioned, he posted his image which went viral online.
A few days later, the only signed print of this photograph was auctioned on Facebook for 2 million rubles.
Dmitry Markov promised to donate the sum to two associations for the defense of political prisoners.
This photographer, but also a social worker and journalist, worked as a volunteer in the Pskov region in a boarding school for mentally handicapped children (or those kept as such) and as a tutor in the village of Fedkovo for children, rescued from orphanages.
Idritsa, Pskov region
,
#DraftRussia
series , 2016, by Dmitry Markov.
courtesy Gallery of the day & La Fab.
Photo Dmitry Markov
His entire Instagram account, followed by Martin Parr's Studio, is full of very strong photos both in their frontality, their energy and their delicacy.
Children have an astonishing presence there, between lost angels and little soldiers (784 publications, 879,000 subscribers).
Laughter despite the snow, play despite the dust, life despite everything.
Coïncidence. Cet autodidacte de la photographie, incroyablement inspiré, est mort le 16 février 2024, à 41 ans, le même jour qu'Alexeï Navalny. Les causes de son décès ne sont pas encore connues, même si ceux qui l’ont connu, n’ont pas oublié ses addictions et le fantôme de la drogue qui planait sur sa vie depuis ses 13 ans. Reste aujourd’hui son œuvre qu’a montrée à Paris et à New York, en pionnière, la Galerie du jour d’Agnès b. «Je suis profondément émue par la liberté et la vérité contenues dans la vie quotidienne de ces enfants qu’il aime tant. Je pense que cet amour est évident. C’est pourquoi plusieurs œuvres de Dmitry sont dans ma collection... Pour leur beauté et leur humanité», confia alors Agnès b. qui a réuni la Galerie du Jour et La Fab. - fonds de dotation Agnès b., Place Jean-Michel Basquiat (XIIIe), en face du MK2 Bibliothèque .
Vishegorod, série #DraftRussia, 2016, de Dmitry Markov. © courtesy Galerie du jour & La Fab. © Photo Dmitry Markov
Dmitry Markov raconte le monde comme il va, chez les oubliés d’un rude système toujours totalitaire, dans cette Russie loin des ors de Moscou, où chaque scène est un tableau avec un grain de folie. Il aurait dû être ingénieur, il a ouvert son compte Instagram sans réelle expérience photographique, regardant le monde qui l’entourait depuis l’œil de son téléphone portable. Il s’est impliqué totalement avec le «Burn Diary's project» pour lequel il a saisi le quotidien des habitants de Pskov, ville à 20 km de la frontière avec l’Estonie.
En 2015, il a reçu une bourse du Getty et d’Instagram destinée aux photographes œuvrant sur le champ documentaire. En 2016, il devint le premier Russe à participer à la compétition Apple's Taken de la campagne iPhone. Son premier livre, #Draft #Russia, sur les gens ordinaires des provinces russes, a été publié en 2018 chez Treemedia Éditions. Il suscita intérêt et désarroi. Il a été montré la même année en France dans l’exposition HOPE , une perspective collaborative de la Fondation Manuel Rivera-Ortiz et par Agnès b. à Paris Photo 2018 et 2019 (razzia sur ses tirages carrés à 500 euros pièce). Puis dans sa galerie de Manhattan en 2019.
Belated Childhood, 2009, par Dmitry Markov. © courtesy Galerie du jour & La Fab. © Photo Dmitry Markov
“They’re not just social photos like a lot of people see them. These are my personal encounters and situations. Each photo is like a new chapter in my story. And when people ask me why I look for
"the unpleasant side of life"
, I answer
"because I am part of it", Dmitry Markov testified in 2017. Vulnerability, dependence, candor and pathos explode in the viewer's face , in front of this constant flow of images which becomes a story of the invisible populations of Russia.
“He looks at his subjects, marginalized, underrepresented, as he looks at himself, without condescension and without moral judgment, seeking the meaning of these complex questions.
Some are just luckier than others.
He documents his life as a
“child of his time”
by sharing all his images on Instagram
,” explained Galerie du Jour in 2018 when Dmitry Markov already had 400,000 subscribers on Instagram and 30,000 on Facebook.
Dmitry Markov,
Sormovo, Nizhny Novgorod region
.
Series
#Draft #Russia
, 2107 © courtesy Galerie du jour & La Fab.
© Photo Dmitry Markov
Christian Caujolle, historian of photography and great pioneer of his new talents, praised these
“calm photos of a tormented world, with soft colors, with no strident effect, this balance of form which looks people and things in the face ".
Dmitry Markov, he says, is
“a changing poet, without effects or mannerisms who does not cultivate a style but breathes a kind of obviousness, a correspondence between the scene as it is and the photographer who looks at it and the framed by its objective.
And above all, an empathy for his characters who end up constituting a strange family, difficult to understand, both fragile and present
.
The energetic Liza Fetissova, who created her gallery in Paris in 2007, long called the Russian Tea Room, tried to work with Dmitry Markov whom she saw on Russian social networks and at the Ortiz Foundation in Arles.
“He was a man completely apart, extraordinary, constituted differently, as if above ground, as a saint or a prophet could be who flies over the world and beings.
A paradoxical man too, like every human being.
Shared between the desire to show more and more of his work in France and the retractable instinct of a Russian who disdained the market and the worldly, wanted to control the quality of his prints from a distance, wanted to be recognized, but did not want to be accused to be “a foreign agent”
, she tells us.
Dmitry Markov,
Olkhon Island, Baykal lake
.
#Draft #Russia
series
, 2016 © courtesy Galerie du jour & La Fab.
© Photo Dmitry Markov
“His photos have a particular strength on Instagram where the banal and the spectacular reign, where the objective is usually to hold our attention for two seconds. They impose themselves, like, obviously, his enormous heart, his empathy which shines through in the flow of his images"
, says Liza Fetissova who recognizes in him the
"exalted and die-hard character that we call Russian »
.