About myself

“Look, I’m not an intellectual – I just take pictures.”
Helmut Newton

About myself… I developed an interest in photography when I was about 20 years old in St. Petersburg (Russia), while I was studying music and photography in St. Petersburg State Conservatory. I had the pleasure of living in a beautiful city, rich in history, with some of the most famous museums in the world. I think that the conservatory atmosphere, coupled with the deeply rooted art culture, gave the city a never-fleeting spirit of arts and music. At that time, I focused on landscapes and cityscapes, although pursuing an interest in photography in the 1970s in the USSR was very expensive. After I immigrated to the USA in 1989, I started to work for Apco Co. Custom Photo Lab on the west side in New York. After gaining some experience, I opened my own Custom Photo lab in New York in 1993 that I named AZAMO. 7 years after that, I opened another lab named Vegafoto. All these years I have been working across different genres: portraiture, street photography, celebrity events, nude, etc. I wanted to master different areas of photography and be ubiquitous.. I worked as a photographer with S.Rostropovich, Seiji Ozawa, Michael Baryshnikov, James Earl Jones, and other ballet stars…

No matter what I am working on: Nudes, Landscapes or Nature, I always strive to reduce my subject to the essences of line, shadow, shape and balance, while bringing out it's emotional intensity to an elixir of expressive power. When you think cities, or countries, the word beautiful usually is not the first thing that comes to mind. Good photography can turn a delapidated city into a breathtaking image. Some of my images are extremely colorful, some are very dramatic. A special place in my photography is dedicated to ballet dancers. Bursting with beautiful images, this collection presents the human body – that richly expressive instrument that dancers use with such force, honesty and intelligence – in an innocent clarity. In nudes, I was trying to capture sensuous forms, playing with light and texture to find (explore the line between) the inner beauty and sexuality. This sensuality, richness and power (truth) pervade much of the art. I see the human form and all it’s amazing potential with the belief that the soul is the most important part of being beautiful and that it can be caught through the lens. There is only you and your camera. The limitations in your photography are in yourself, for what we see is what we are…