by Waiting in a Russian police station after being arrested at an opposition protest in 2021, photographer Dmitry Markov suddenly raised his iPhone, took a photo, and posted it on Instagram.
The image, of a burly police officer in body armor and a black balaclava sitting beneath a photo of president Vladimir Putin, quickly went viral. For many, he became a symbol of the brutality of the Russian regime, the crackdown on dissent and – because the policeman was hiding his face – the Kremlin’s fear of its own people.
Markov’s ability to capture a zeitgeist moment was characteristic, and his brand of photography took the viewer deep within modern Russia.
Since his death earlier this month, aged 41, Markov has gained a reputation as one of Russia’s best photographers. Although his death was announced a few hours after that of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, there was no suggestion of foul play.
He was the “Cartier-Bresson of Russia,” said Kirill Serebrennikov, a leading Russian theater director who collaborated with Markov. “He was able to capture the soul of the people, their DNA. If you want to understand Russians, you should look at Dima Markov’s photos.
With no university degree, and little formal training, Markov began taking photographs in Moscow in the mid-2000s. From the beginning, he had no interest in historic buildings or famous people. Instead, he was drawn to places like train stations, markets, and the fringes of Russian cities that are a maze of crumbling 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. It was a side of Russia absent from bombastic official narratives about Putin, but one that was instantly recognizable to most Russians.
“There are many people living in Russia who were photographed by Dima Markov. But they don’t see it as he saw it. They see it as something terrible, something shameful, and something that should be forgotten,” Serebrennikov said. “Dima looked at him and could see some kind of beauty, eroticism and glamour.”
I first met Markov in 2007 when we were volunteering at a state-run orphanage for children with mental and physical disabilities in a village in western Russia. He was tough and enjoyed arguing, but he was also kind and generous – and his compassion for the children trapped in the Russian orphanage system was palpable.
Eventually, Markov abandoned traditional cameras, and switched to an iPhone only. He set up an Instagram account that attracted almost a million followers.
Not the sort of artist to stay away from his subjects, Markov combined photography and philanthropy, and used his prodigious talents to support charitable causes from orphan integration schemes, to human rights groups and drug rehabilitation programmes. “Justice is the domain of the devil; the realm of God is charity and forgiveness,” he told one interviewer in 2020.
Perhaps his own history was one of the reasons why Markov was drawn to those on the fringes of society. He first started using heroin at 18 while growing up in the Moscow commuter town of Pushkino, and in recent years has been very public about his two-decade struggle with addiction – just as he about his childhood traumas, including an alcoholic father.
“He was not shy about talking 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 deal with his past, and he often said that without photography, he would be dead long ago. “Audiences see some of my subjects as bleak, if not, let’s be honest, depressing. But I feel the opposite: peace,” he wrote in his book 2018 Draft. “When I manage to express this darkness in a text or a photograph, I feel that it becomes a little less inside me.”
After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Markov remained in the country – a decision he found controversial, and which drew a lot of criticism online. Although he opposed the war, he could not see an artistic future for himself outside of Russia, and felt bound 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 social media posts. “I don’t know how to act properly in this situation and be a good person to everyone, or if, indeed, it is even possible to do that.”
In the days since his death, his photography has been widely admired, and some critics have placed him in the tradition of socially oriented Russian artists, which includes the 19th-century painter Ilya Repin.
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Pivovarov compared him to Renaissance masters such as Caravaggio. “People will judge how the early 2000s were like Dima’s photos,” he said. “He saw the light inside nondescript people, and his love shone on them. And they are at the center of the universe.”
