I have always needed to express my inner world.

When I was a teenager, I thought I would learn to draw, and later to write. Photography is a very intimate thing for me. My father was an amateur photographer. He took photos of mushrooms in the woods, flowers, cats and my portraits when I was little. Nothing special, but the darkroom where he developed his photos had something magical. As a child, I was fascinated by this magic. All those moments spent with my father looking at his photos had a profound impact on me, and today I have the feeling that he never dared to really develop his passion.

My first interest in photography dates back to this time; above all, I keep the indelible trace of a determination, that of following one's dreams. Witness to the reasonable path that my parents had chosen – that of an engineer – to “ensure daily life” in a Soviet Union where daydreaming had little place, I understood very young how life sometimes diverted us from our paths. I remember that Jacques Brel said that we must never give up on research, on adventure, on life, on love... because happiness is our true destiny.

A search like that of beauty in this tormented era and disappointments after hope at a time when perestroika was blowing a promising wind of change over his country. After fifteen years of practicing sociology, I focused on my research on this harmony, which seemed to me to be missing so much. What I like to remember is what remains of the beauty of the movements, their poetry. I like to observe the mystery of movement, its birth. He appears and the next second he's gone. Where does this beauty come from? …