While waiting at a Russian police station after being arrested at an opposition protest in 2021, photographer Dmitry Markov secretly picked up his iPhone, took a photo and posted it on Instagram.
The image of a portly police officer wearing a bulletproof vest and black balaclava sitting beneath a photo of President Vladimir Putin quickly went viral. For many, it has become a symbol of the brutality of the Russian regime, its repression of dissidents, and the Kremlin’s fear of its own people because the police officer hid his face.
This was characteristic of Markov’s ability to capture a moment that reflects the spirit of the times and his style of photography that takes the viewer deep into modern Russia.
Since his death earlier this month (41), Markov has been remembered as one of Russia’s best photographers. Although his death was announced just hours after the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, there was no allegation of foul play.
Kirill Serebrennikov, one of the leading Russian theater directors who collaborated with Markov, said that he was the “Russian Cartier-Bresson”. “He managed to capture people’s souls, their DNA. If you want to understand Russians, you should look at Dima Markov’s photographs.”
Markov, who had no university degree and little formal education, started taking photographs in Moscow in the mid-2000s. From the beginning, he had no interest in historical buildings or celebrities. Instead, he was drawn to places like the edges of Russian cities, including train stations, markets and a maze of Soviet-era apartment blocks.
His subjects were always the most vulnerable in society: orphans, alcoholics, addicts, the homeless, the very old and dying, conscripts, and children. This was a side of Russia not found in the exaggerated official narratives under Putin, but instantly recognizable to most Russians.
“Many people live in Russia photographed by Dima Markov. But they don’t see it the way he sees it. They see it as something terrible, shameful and something that should be forgotten,” Serebrennikov said. “Dima looked at her and could see beauty, eroticism and some kind of charm.”
I first met Markov in 2007, when I was volunteering at a state-run orphanage for mentally and physically disabled children in a village in western Russia. He was intense and enjoyed arguing, but he was also kind and generous; His empathy for children trapped in Russia’s orphanage system was also evident.
Eventually Markov abandoned traditional cameras and switched exclusively to the iPhone. She set up an Instagram account that has attracted almost a million followers.
Not the kind of artist to keep his distance from his subjects, Markov combined photography and philanthropy, using his extraordinary talent to support charitable causes, from orphan integration schemes to human rights groups and drug rehabilitation programs. “Justice is the realm of the devil; “God’s domain is charity and forgiveness,” he told an interviewer in 2020.
Perhaps one of the reasons Markov was drawn to those on the fringes of society was his own history. He first started using heroin at age 18, while growing up in the suburban Moscow town of Pushkino, and in recent years he has been public about his two-decade struggle with addiction, as well as about his childhood traumas, including an alcoholic father.
“He wasn’t afraid to talk about his demons,” said Aleksei Pivovarov, a Russian journalist and friend of Markov.
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Creativity was one of the ways he tried to cope with his past, and he has said many times that without photography he would be long dead. “Audiences find some of my subjects bleak, and if not, let’s be honest, depressing. But I feel the opposite: peace,” he wrote in his 2018 book The Blueprint. “When I manage to express this pessimism with a text or a photo, I feel as if the feeling inside me diminishes a little more.”
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Markov remained in the country; It was a decision he agonized over and which sparked a lot of criticism online. Although he was against the war, he saw no artistic future for himself outside Russia and felt attached to the people and places he knew.
“I can’t stop loving those close to me and start hating them,” he wrote in one of his last posts on social media. “I don’t know how to act right in this situation and be a good person for everyone, or if that’s even possible.”
In the days after his death, there was an outpouring of appreciation for his photographs, with some critics placing him in the tradition of socially oriented Russian artists that included the 19th-century painter Ilya Repin.
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Pivovarov compared him to Renaissance masters such as Caravaggio. “People will understand what the early 2000s were like from Dima’s photos,” he said. “He saw the light in ordinary people and showed them his love. And they become the center of the universe.”