Death of Dmitry Markov, 41-year-old Russian photographer who embodied freedom

Dmitry Markov was a Russian phenomenon, a photographer with wide open eyes, 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 considered as such) and as a tutor in the village of Fedkovo for children, rescued from orphanages.

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.

Coincidence. This incredibly inspired self-taught photographer died on February 16, 2024, at the age of 41, the same day as Alexeï Navalny. The causes of his death are not yet known, even if those who knew him have not forgotten his addictions and the ghost of drugs that hung over his life since he was 13. What remains today is his work, which was shown in Paris and New York, as a pioneer, at the Galerie du jour d’Agnès b. “I am deeply moved by the freedom and truth contained in the daily lives of these children whom he loves so much. I think this love is obvious. This is why several works by Dmitry are in my collection... For their beauty and their humanity,” confided Agnès b. which brought together Galerie du Jour and La Fab. - Agnès b. endowment fund, Place Jean-Michel Basquiat (13th century), opposite the MK2 Library.

Dmitry Markov tells the world as it goes, among those forgotten by a harsh and still totalitarian system, in this Russia far from the gold of Moscow, where each scene is a painting with a touch of madness. He should have been an engineer, he opened his Instagram account with no real photographic experience, looking at the world around him through the eye of his cell phone. He was totally involved with the “Burn Diary's project” for which he captured the daily lives of the inhabitants of Pskov, a city 20 km from the border with Estonia.

In 2015, he received a grant from the Getty and Instagram intended for photographers working in the documentary field. In 2016, he became the first Russian to participate in the iPhone campaign's Apple's Taken competition. His first book,

“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''”, testified Dmitry Markov 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.

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 of being “a foreign agent,” she tells us.

“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, as, 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 ".