I was born in July 1967 in Kuibyshev, Russia and grew up in a small town up in the south of Ural Mountains. My parents were both construction engineers.
In 1987, I graduated mechanical college and moved to the North, Tyumen region where for around two years I worked as engineer-designer in a company that repaired equipment for the oil industry.
In 1989, I moved to Saint-Petersburg, started studying at the Railways Academy.In 1998 I started studying family psychology in the Academy of Culture of S-Petersburg.
In 1999, I decided to move abroad. A chain of accidents brought me first to Brussels and soon after to Oostende, Belgium, where I studied Dutch and followed course of “Film and Video Kunst” in Kunst Academie, Oostende.
In 2001, I was offered a job as a cook in a vegetarian restaurant in Gent. I moved again and worked during the days, while during the evenings I studied photography in Sint-Lucas Academy, Gent.
Four years of the formal studies of photography didn’t really bring me closer to what I was looking for. Following my personal search at the end of the second school year (during the summer of 2003) I took part in the workshop of Michael Ackerman at TPW, Italy. There I found something that reanimated in me the hope to find the way of belonging to the time around me with the help of photography.
The first thing I was intensely busy with after meeting Ackerman was my polaroid self-portraits, trying to capture directly what I felt rather then translating it through what i saw, to understand myself better by observing the states of my own being, to create the mystery out of my daily routine, to alter the truth … During the next two years it grew into 44 polaroid portraits that were exposed in the year 2007 at the “Month of Photography” in Krakow. At the same time I was working on other long-term project “Après Nous” collection of portraits of people I met on my way: relatives, loves, friends, colleagues I used to work with, places I visited. Not relaying on objectivity, documentary-ness and chronological order I tried to re-create my direct experience of facing the reality around me, as brought back from the past by the waves of my memory, as chain of flashes of bright, meaningful moments.
Text By Sergey Bykov
All images ©Sergey Bykov * image1: In a Common Language with Monks, 2007 * image2:The Heroine With A Thousand Faces, 2006 * image3: That That Precedes Attention, 2009