Documentary projects
My journey into documentary photography began in January 2012, at Sergey Maksimishin’s master class. Today, with pride and sincere gratitude, I can say that this person has become for me not only a master, teacher and colleague, but also a friend
The first documentary project was a story about the servants of the ancient temple of Jigannath in the Indian city of Puri. Then there was a nine-month training on the course of Sergey Maksimishin at the School of Visual Arts and many expeditions to countries and cities where Sergey conducted master classes – taught students to create documentary photo stories. Traditionally, the object of such a photo story could be a “person”, “place”, “phenomenon” or “event”. In 10 days, each student had to choose his own topic, collect material and prepare a project “for printing”. It was quite a stressful, but extremely fascinating process. As a result, a number of publications appeared in my portfolio, which can be found below.
Thanks to this experience, it became obvious to me that it is no longer enough for a documentary photographer to take a “beautiful picture”. We still need to find this picture in a bunch of other frames and, most importantly, collect the necessary images in a series. Plus, record audio, edit video and write text. Sometimes this process resembled a gambling puzzle game. Each selected photo should be an important part of the story, a kind of separate “sentence” visualizing the content of the story. And if any of you will be pleased or interested in these documentary stories, then Sergey Maksimishin did not waste his time on me in vain.
