Soviet photographer Mikhail Dashevsky

Soviet photographer Mikhail Dashevsky. At the exhibition. 1980s, Moscow

Soviet photographer Mikhail Dashevsky is the author of series of photographs which he took during sad days of perestroika, and collapse of the great state – the USSR. A civil engineer by profession, doctor of technical sciences, Mikhail Aronovich Dashevsky can’t be called professional photographer in a strict sense of the term. Mikhail Aronovich Dashevsky was born in 1935 in Moscow. In 1953 entered the Moscow Engineering and Construction Institute, from which he graduated in 1958. It was a time of change: the death of Stalin and Beria’s execution, XX Party Congress with the revelations, the International youth festival – life was changing fast. After graduation he worked briefly at the construction of the Stalingrad and Bratsk hydroelectric power stations, and traveled around the country.

30 years later. Photographer Mikhail Dashevsky

Photographic biography of Mikhail Dashevsky started in Moscow photo club “Innovator” in 1969. The sense of photography as an art has developed in the photo club directed by prominent Soviet photographers of the time AV Khlebnikov and GN Soshalsky. In the club, Mikhail Dashevsky was inspired by the discussions of professional photographers and the Soviet intelligentsia. At first, the work of Mikhail Dashevsky was far from being optimistic. Perhaps that is why for the time prior to 1985 was published in print only one work in the magazine “Soviet photo” (1972) – “Fisherman’s Daughter”.

Arbat children. 1960s, Moscow. Photographer Mikhail Dashevsky

Since 1985, things have changed. In 1989, the Russian-language journal “Time and We” in the US, published a selection of photos of Russia. In 1994, through the efforts of Michael Golosovsky, known collector of photo art, in Krasnogorsk area of Moscow was held the first exhibition “Sunken Time”, which in 2004 in the full version was shown at the Museum of Architecture of AV Shchusev.

Soviet photographer Mikhail Dashevsky

Breakfast after victory

Boots. Photographer Mikhail Dashevsky

Dashevsky works in the genre of documentary, but he considers himself an artistic photographer. The author has identified these photos as the pictures, not events, and the internal state of people or the world around them. In his view, the event can not stay long with the audience. Therefore, fixation of impressions of the incident is the subject of interest.