‘Russia’s Cartier-Bresson’: how Dmitry Markov captured beauty amidst the brutality of Putin’s regime

Waiting in a Russian police station after being arrested at an opposition protest in 2021, photographer Dmitry Markov surreptitiously raised his iPhone, snapped a photo, and posted it to Instagram.

The image , of a burly police officer in body armour and a black balaclava sitting below a photograph of president Vladimir Putin, quickly went viral. For many, it became a symbol of the brutality of the Russian regime, its crackdown on dissent and – because the police officer was hiding his face – the Kremlin’s fear of its own people.

It was characteristic of Markov’s ability to capture a zeitgeist moment, and his brand of photography that took the viewer deep inside modern Russia.

Since his death earlier this month, 41, Markov has been hailed as one of Russia’s best photographers. Although his passing was announced just a few hours after that of opposition leader Alexei Navalny , there was no suggestion of foul play.

He was a “Russian Cartier-Bresson”, said Kirill Serebrennikov, a leading Russian theatre 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 in the way of formal training, Markov began taking photos in Moscow in the mid-2000s. From the beginning, he had no interest in historic buildings or celebrities. Instead, he was drawn to places such as train stations, markets, and the edges of Russian cities that are a maze of crumbling Soviet-era blocks of flats.

His subjects were always the most vulnerable in society: orphans, alcoholics, addicts, homeless people, the very old and dying, conscripts and children. It was a side of Russia absent from bombastic official narratives under Putin, but one that was instantly recognisable to most Russians.

“A lot of people live in the Russia that Dima Markov photographed. But they don’t see it like he saw it. They see it as something terrible, something shameful, and something that should be forgotten,” said Serebrennikov. “Dima looked at it and was able to see beauty, eroticism and some sort of glamour.”

I first met Markov in 2007 when we were 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 – and his empathy for the kids trapped in Russia’s orphanage system was obvious.

Eventually, Markov abandoned traditional cameras, and switched exclusively to an iPhone. He set up an Instagram account that went on to attract almost a million followers.

Not the sort of artist who maintained a distance from his subjects, Markov mixed photography and philanthropy, and used his prodigious talent to support charitable causes from orphan integration schemes, to human rights groups and drug rehabilitation programmes. “Justice is the realm of the devil; the realm of God is charity and forgiveness,” he told one interviewer in 2020.

Perhaps one of the reasons Markov was drawn to those on the margins of society was his own history. He first started using heroin at 18 when growing up in the Moscow commuter town of Pushkino, and in recent years had been very public about his two-decade struggle with addiction – just as he was about his childhood traumas, including an alcoholic father.

“He wasn’t 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 said on many occasions that, without photography, would have been dead long ago. “Viewers see some of my subjects as bleak, if not, let’s be honest, depressing. But I feel the opposite: peace,” he wrote in his 2018 book Draft. “When I manage to express this bleakness in a text or photograph, I feel as if 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 that he agonised over, and which sparked much online criticism. While he opposed the war, he was unable to see an artistic future for himself outside Russia, and he felt bound to the people and places he knew.

“I can’t just stop loving those who are 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 correctly in this situation and be a good person for everyone, or whether, indeed, that is even possible.”

In the days after his death, there has been an outpouring of appreciation for his photography, with some critics placing him in a tradition of socially oriented Russian artists that includes 19th-century painter Ilya Repin.

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Pivovarov compared him to Renaissance masters such as Caravaggio. “People will judge what the early 2000s were like by Dima’s photographs,” he said. “He saw the light inside nondescript people, and shone his love on them. And they become the centre of the universe.”