Daniil Ivanov

One should learn how to make photos for all his life. Making photos isn’t a job, but creation and way of life. There are almost no Russian schools but there are good reportage photographs. I realized that we don’t have any fashion photographers when I was in New York. By the way, it’s the best place to study photography.

New York is the best city ever.

If you take up reportage, photography can be a really dangerous profession. Just enough to see the death statistics among photographers for the last 10 years. If you earth up glamorous vegetable patches the worst thing that can happen to you is piles in the cerebellum or idea’s constipation.

It’s impossible to name the best photographer in the world, all depends on the artist’s genre. You may admire Rodchenko as an experimentalist who was the first to discover the angles every amateur uses now. You may worship, and may be you must, Henri Cartier-Bresson or Brassaï, Shaihet or Alpert. There is Helmut Newton, but even here the fashion moved on. Is it possible to paint like Leonardo? Technically it is, but it isn’t liturgically. In this respect all the masters I’ve mentioned are the icon painters and their photos are icons for me.

In Moscow people don’t smile in the streets because they have problems with teeth.

Now I admire Tomas Munita as a reportage master and Richard Warren as a fashion photographer. Technically I want to approximate to Richard Avedon. And I like the works of my friend Aleksandr Petrosyan from St. Petersburg for their profoundness and suspence.

This crisis was made by people who benefit from it, and it’s always quite a few of them. During the last crisis I bought a “Mercedes”, it was after a month our country shitted out of luck. But it wasn’t me to blame for that default, it came itself.

Like all people in our country I de-stress with alcohol. Or just take an airplane and go away.

The craziest photographing I had in Paris in 2006. There was a final of Champions League and I was photographing with a very simple camera Canon 20 D and a nonprofessional 70-200/4 lens. Who knows will understand. The lighting in the “Stade de France” was more like light in a corridor of a communal flat, mystery and dark. In the second time the tropical downpour didn’t leave any chances to many photographers, it penetrated into all the minute cracks and device’s bosom. In such conditions my camera got no chances to make something that would resemble a photo. But there was a little miracle, almost all the photos were very sharp, rather light, interesting and diverse. Then I realized that your camera could listen to your wish and pray, you only need to wish it badly. Afterwards I could publish those Parisian photos in lots of Russian and foreign issues.

In Moscow I lack for the sea.

Kostroma is mon amour. It’s the only city that wasn’t touched by barbaric destructions. The streets are like in the XVIII-XIX centuries. But even there everything changes for the worst.