I started taking photographs when I was eight or nine, back in the Soviet Union, in those strange places called photostations — part children’s club, part laboratory, part “let’s trust a child with chemicals.”

My first camera was assembled from three broken ones. One survived.

Since then, photography has been something close to a reflex — a small internal click, like a breath or a gesture. Most frames happen because not taking them would feel stranger than taking them. A moment appears, insists, and then it’s gone. The next one will be different anyway.

Over the years I’ve worked in television, radio, film, publishing, sound, archives, and with people who fit neatly into categories and people who absolutely didn’t. All of it turned out to be variations of the same occupation: observing and preserving.

My photographs move somewhere between reportage and fiction. A passerby can look like a character; a character can look like a passerby. A courtyard becomes a stage; a stage becomes a courtyard. Sometimes nothing happens, and yet something already has.

I have a fondness for old cameras, Soviet lenses, expired film, accidental exposures, double frames, scratches, chemical ghosts, and other evidence that photography is a physical creature with its own behavior.

I keep looking. Sometimes the shutter follows.