Born in 1978 in the former Soviet Union, Alexander (Alex) Efimoff spent his earliest years on the island of Sakhalin in the North Pacific. Four years later, the Efimoff family moved to the mainland where they settled in the city of Khabarovsk.

It was in Khabarovsk that Alex’s creative interests and talent for painting were nurtured at home by his father, a sculptor, and at the local school of arts. However, rather than continue his education and formally train as a painter, when he left high school Alex accepted a job as a graphic artist with a newspaper publisher. Several years later, in the late 1990s, he relocated to Moscow. At the turn of the century the Russian capital was a magnet for young entrepreneurs and artists seeking their fortune at the height of the dotcom economic boom. The internet technology company Alex co-founded quickly became one of Russia’s biggest online portals.

It was during a trip to Tunisia in 2001 that Alex first tried his hand at photography. He bought his first ‘serious’ camera, experimented with the colours and sights of North Africa, and enjoyed the experience so much that his new interest quickly became a passion. In that same year his parents, disillusioned with life in post-Soviet Russia, made the decision to move to New Zealand. It turned out to be a life-changing decision for the whole family. For the next several years Alex travelled back and forth between Moscow and Auckland before permanently settling in New Zealand in 2007. The following year, during a trip to Wellington he fell in love with the harbour capital’s dramatic landscape and weather and made the move still further south. In a land of new opportunities he also decided to formally train as a photographer. In 2010 he graduated from Massey University with a Diploma in Photography.

Richard Avedon, one of the photographers Alex admires the most, once described art as “about control, the encounter between control and uncontrollable.” It is an adage that Alex subscribes too in his own work, most recently seen in his well received portraiture series (and the first personal exhibition of his work). He is inspired in his work by Avedon but also by Annie Leibovitz and Herb Ritz, photographers who revolutionized photographic portraiture as an art form and brought it to mainstream public attention in the 1980s and 1990s.

“For me,” says Alex, “photography is an artistic statement. I want to be able to translate a narrative through the image itself. Each image should speak for itself and not require a word of explanation. The point is to show the essence of the subject, through personality, and the use of light and angle, perhaps in a way that they have never seen themselves before. I create a few different versions of each shot and then choose the one I feel a connection with.”

Photography also offers Alex a way to give back to the community. He has already started donating his work to charities and encouraging them to sell the images to fund raise. In this way, he hopes to build bridges between the local arts scene and the non-profit community. “For me, creating the image is not the end goal but a single step to help ensure my work is useful,” he says. “Art might have a practical purpose and even another life, and not just be admired from affair in galleries or in books.”