Mikhail Stenin Photographer, curator, producer. Lives and works in Moscow.
He graduated from the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he also completed postgraduate studies, and from the Academy of Classical Photography. For many years he worked in the film industry.
The central theme of his work is man and nature. In the series Love Has Four Paws and On the Way to One’s Star he explores the bond between people and animals; in One-on-One with the Universe he places the figure of a cosmonaut in everyday urban settings, juxtaposing daily life with humanity’s dream of space. His training as a historian shows in his attention to documentary detail and to the memory of the first pioneers of space exploration.
His solo projects have been shown at the K. E. Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics (Kaluga), the Gallery of Classical Photography (Moscow) and the Murom Museum of History and Art. He has taken part in group exhibitions at the Russian Museum of Photography (Nizhny Novgorod), the Darwin Museum, the ArtMoscow and ArtMir fairs and the Fotokrok festival (Vitebsk).
His works are held in the collections of the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Russian Museum of Photography, the Tsiolkovsky Museum of the History of Cosmonautics and in private collections.
Member of the Creative Union of Artists of Russia and the Union of Journalists of Russia. Producer of the FotoTop contemporary photography community; founder of Gallery 13/20.
Artist statement
I photograph to share my state of mind and my relationship with the world.
A project usually arrives suddenly — as an image that becomes clear all at once. Then the work begins: I structure it, plan it and bring it to life. This is a trace of my past as a producer: an idea must not only be seen, but carried through to the end.
Animals, to me, are equals. They are intermediaries between our world and the world of primordial nature — a world that is slipping away and that we can hardly see any more. When I photograph them alongside people, I photograph what still connects us to that world.
Space is part of us, and we are part of it. That is why, in my pictures, a cosmonaut appears in a café, a park, a museum: the dream of the distant lives inside the most ordinary life.
Man is either the miracle of the universe or its mistake. I do not know the answer. But every frame is my attempt to look closely at the question.