![[Time] to death: haircut of an 18-year-old teenager, before his release from orphanage.](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/f1d0e10a4604164bf0cbb63b5cf2b39857601800/0_0_2462_2462/master/2462.jpg?width=1300&dpr=2&s=none)
From 2005 to 2012, Dmitry Markov photographed the daily lives of Russian children and teenagers in one of Russia’s many orphanages for neglected children in a village near Pskov, close to the border with Estonia. Working there as a volunteer, he began shooting on an iPhone after his camera was stolen from his room.
A former street kid and opioid addict himself, Markov also works as a journalist, blogger, activist and street photographer. His images, posted daily on Instagram (@dcim.ru), have garnered him 369,000 followers and led to several awards.
“A drug addict is never satisfied, he always wants more,” he wrote in a vivid biographical essay for his first photobook, Draft (2018). “Do not take it as a recommendation, but this kind of thirst might be very useful for a photographer. You are never satisfied with results, you always want to try again.”
As this powerful portrait of a young male orphan attests, Markov’s affinity with his subjects does not undercut the grittiness of his style. The occasion is the boy’s imminent 18th birthday and his head is being shaved by a volunteer at the orphanage – “in honour,” elaborates Markov, “of the young guy’s release into adulthood”.
It is a powerful portrait brimming with suggestion, from the ornately tattooed hand and forearm of the anonymous barber to the unflinching, yet unreadable, head-on gaze of the young man. The barber’s black gown with its white, elasticated collar lends him the aura of a young priest, but this coming-of-age ritual announces a future beyond the orphanage that will almost certainly be even more precarious than the past that led him there.
There is a tenderness here, too, in the deft touch of the cupped hand that encloses the youth’s forehead and in the ineffable sadness of those flecks of hair that have fallen on his shoulders. “When I can render this sadness in text or picture,” says Markov, “I feel that I have less of it inside.”
Self-taught and guided by his instincts and hard-earned experience, Dmitry Markov rejects the label of socially aware photographer. “Every added picture is another chapter in my own history,” he says of his Instagram archive, “and when I get asked why I go after ‘life’s unpleasant side’, I reply: ‘Because I am a part of it.’”
#DRAFT #RUSSIA, an exhibition of 60 works by Dmitry Markov is at agnès b. gallery, New York until 4 June