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Since the age of sixteen, Игорь Мухин (1961) has been taking photographs. Armed with a Смена-8М camera, he started his journey. So, when he found himself among artists and musicians in the 1980s, he already had a trained eye – and a better camera. Mukhin (sometimes Moukhin) witnessed major changes and began documenting them.

Orphaned early, Sergei Lobovikov (= Сергей Лобовиков, 1870-1941) was sent at the age of 14 from a village to the provincial town of Vyatka (now Kirov), where he would later become an honorary citizen. He was meant to be trained as a shopkeeper and photographer. The rest is history that you should mostly see (he never became a shopkeeper).

After the Soviet Union collapsed (1991), Alexey Titarenko (1962) took what may be his best photographs in his hometown of St. Petersburg. At least, many of his most famous works, found in series like City of Shadows (Город теней). There was much to document, but Titarenko did more than that.

Photographer, model, and author, with a past that didn’t immediately suggest such a career. A portrait of Gosha Bergal (Гоша Бергал) on Zen Yandex, and more recently in Paws for thought: a heartwarming photo diary about a rescue dog and his owner (The Calvert Journal, 2020). About how a knee injury and a dog led to new paths.

Described as (and see especially) The photographer using an iPhone to document life on the margins of Russian society (rferl, 2020) and Photographer Documents the Gritty Streets of Russia With an iPhone (My Modern Met, 2018). Photos can also be seen in a collage (4 m) below, with something similar but longer (13 m) in Dmitry Markov – Дмитрий Марков #Черновик (Arthur Erhan, 2018).

There’s little color to be seen or needed in the work of photographer Aleksey Myakishev (Алексей Мякишев). Born (1971) in Kirov (or Киров), formerly called Vyatka until 1934 and still sometimes referred to as such. Vyatka is also the name of one of Myakishev’s most famous projects, the photo series (2014) in which he captured the people and life of his home region.