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Biography Mikhail Lemkhin was born in 1949 in Leningrad, USSR (now St. Petersburg, Russia). By 1983, when he emigrated to the United States, he had twenty years of work experience in photography and journalism. Lemkhin studied at the Leningrad State University and received a Master's Degree in Journalism and Photojournalism in 1973. Having gotten his first camera at the age of seven, he considered himself a photographer since he was eight, and first received national recognition at the age of fifteen, when his photographs were published in 1964 in Sovietskoye Photo, the only photo magazine in the USSR at the time. A year later, the magazine featured an article about Lemkhin, accompanied by his photos. While still in his teens, Lemkhin began taking portraits of cultural figures. Throughout his sixty-year career, he made hundreds of photo portraits of Russian and Western poets, artists, filmmakers, dissidents, political figures, and journalists. Among them are Andrei Sakharov, Vaclav Havel, Andrei Tarkovsky, Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz, Randy Newman, Michelangelo Antonioni, Susan Sontag, Allen Ginsberg, Israel Lopez, Joseph Mankiewicz, Eduardo Galeano, Seamus Heaney, David Mamet, Dizzy Gillespie, Joseph Brodsky, and many others. Lemkhin took part in more than fifty photo exhibitions, including thirty-one solo exhibitions, and was a member of The National Press Photographers Association. His photographs have appeared in American and European periodicals, including Nikon News, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe (USA); Moscow News, Literaturnaya Gazeta, Nezavisimaia Gazeta, Ogoniok, Kommersant (Russia); The Times Literary Supplement(UK); Photographos (Greece); NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands); Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden). Lemkhin published three photo albums: Missing Frames (Hermitage Publishers, 1995, foreword by Olga Andreyev Carlisle), a photo album of portraits of Russian, European, and American cultural figures; Joseph Brodsky, Leningrad: Fragments (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, foreword by Czeslaw Milosz, afterword by Susan Sontag); Click! Goes the Camera, and a Birdie Flies Out (Bulat Okudzhava USA Cultural Fund, 2015, foreword by Viacheslav Ivanov, afterword by Yuri Leving; 2nd edition by Sovpadenie Publishers, Moscow, 2017). Lemkhin’s photographs are part of the collections of the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation (Paris, France), and of the State Russian Museum and the Anna Akhmatova Museum (Saint Petersburg, Russia). A large collection of his photographs has been purchased by Stanford University for its Green Library. Many of Lemkhin’s photos have become part of private collections, notably those of Nobel Laureates Seamus Heaney (Dublin, Ireland); Derek Walkott (Trinidad); Maria Brodsky (New York); Olga Carlisle, Carl Djerassi, Sean Penn, Philip Kaufman, George Krevsky (San Francisco); Dusan Makavejev, Otar Iosseliani, Maria Sinyavsky, Gidon Kremer (Paris, France); Elliott and Rhoda Levinthal (Palo Alto); Manoel de Oliveira (Porto, Portugal); Vasiliy Livanov (Moscow, Russia), Mikhail Piotrovsky (St. Petersburg, Russia), Yasushi Kojima (Tokyo, Japan); Joaquin Lens (La Coruna, Spain); Michelangelo Antonioni (Rome, Italy); Vaclav Havel (Prague, Czech Republic). More than a hundred articles about Lemkhin’s photography have been published in the USA and in Europe. Lemkhin himself was a published author and a member of The International Association of Art Critics. He has written several hundred articles, a novella and a dozen short stories, which appeared in periodicals in the USA, Europe and Russia. A collection of his articles titled There Is No Return to Anywhere (Chitatel Publishers, introduction by Naum Kleiman) came out in 2012 in St. Petersburg, Russia and received an award from the Russian Guild of Film Scholars. |