Yury A Melnikov

He was born in Moscow in a small house on the edge of a huge old forest which contained the ruins of an ancient castle and spent a lot of time in that forest, exploring its hidden paths and observing its inhabitants.
This instilled in him an observation and love of nature.

In 1974, his father gave Yury his first camera, an SMEMA 8M (still in his collection), and he began photographing the forest and the castle ruins. Yury collected the money he was given for school lunches and used it to buy film and chemicals, borrowed a camera lens from a friend and made prints at night in the bathroom.
Yury went to art school, where he did watercolours and tempera.

In 1980 he went to University, where he took up mountain climbing in earnest. He read a book by Carlo Mauri, an Italian mountaineer and photographer, and redoubled his enthusiasm for the camera.
At that time, magazine illustrations were printed with medium format colour slides, but these were very heavy cameras for a mountaineer, so Yury bought a LUBITEL166B camera and his photos were printed in mountaineering and trekking magazines. Several colour calendars with his photos were published.

When perestroika started, he stopped his passion for photography and only resumed it in 2007 when he bought his first digital camera. Yury got a second lease on life in photography and has been shooting continuously ever since.
Lately he has returned to analogue photography, using both classic and digital.

The main subject of Yury’s work is called ambient photography, which includes landscapes, still lifes, genre scenes and so on. He is inspired by unusual light, an interesting drawing of the subject, the mood of contemplation of some event. Yury never takes portraits, or people in general, unless they are part of the subject of his work.

Yury has not entered his work in special competitions, but he was in the top 4% of photographers for black and white work at the 6th 35AWARDS.

Yury A. Melnikov: “I would like to pass on my sincere thanks to my fellow photographers who inspire me to continue my work and expand my horizons in photography:
Evgeny Timashev,
Steve O’Neions,
Martin Henson,
Wolfgang Moersch,
Ludwig Römer.”