The Rise and Fall of Foto & Video Magazine
In Russia, the 90s were a decade of both instability and promise. Against a backdrop of financial collapse, political coups, and the First Chechen War, young people from across the former Soviet Union flocked to Moscow, where new opportunities beckoned. Among them was the 27-year-old Dmitry Kiyan. He founded Foto & Video: the most groundbreaking photography magazine of the post-Soviet era. As well as bringing legendary photographers like Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, and David Bailey to a generation of eager young Russian artists, it also spotlighted the region’s own rising stars, on the path to becoming legends themselves.
Then, as Foto & Video reached the height of success, Kiyan was removed from his position as editor-in-chief. The magazine struggled on for a few more years, but ultimately went out of print. Its tale is one of artistic passion destroyed by greed — in other words, a tale of modern Russia.
In 1990, Dmitry Kiyan was a student in the Linguistics Departments at Kharkiv National University. He already felt as if he’d lost the last two years of his life doing military service, and by the time he graduated in 1995 he was planning his escape. “There were no opportunities in Ukraine back then,” Kiyan explains. “I just had to leave.” For the majority of young people in eastern Ukraine, that meant going to Moscow. “It felt like everything was happening there,” says Kiyan. He set off to Russia in the summer of 1996, with just $54 in his pocket and a taste for adventure.
Kiyan soon found work as an interpreter, but it was difficult to settle down in Moscow as a foreigner. He was forced to rent rooms in other people’s apartments before finally getting a place of his own. Then, in the autumn of 1996, Kiyan reconnected with several old friends, including a former British exchange student from university. He told Kiyan about a fellow British expat, Charles Butler, and his Russian business partner, Andrei Andreyev. The pair wanted to launch a photography magazine, and had the money and resources to do so. They just needed someone with the vision to pull it off — someone with a lifelong passion for photography, just like Kiyan. This twist of fate led to the birth of Foto & Video.
Numerous magazines were being launched in Russia at the end of the 90s, with major western magazines like Vogue establishing offices for the first time in Moscow. To young people like Kiyan, the flurry of activity embodied the sense of freedom that defined Moscow at the time. There was a sense of promise in the air; Russia was opening up, and people from all over the world were flocking to it. Those who called Moscow home thought that anything was possible.
Pavel Antonov, whose photos have since been featured in Vogue, Vanity Fair, ELLE, Harper's Bazaar, and numerous other high-profile publications, was the first Russian photographer to be featured on the cover of the magazine. “There were a lot of interesting people from Kharkiv hanging around Moscow at that time, and Dima really stood out,” says Antonov. “He just blew everyone away with his encyclopedic knowledge of photography and his aesthetic tastes.”
The documentary photographer Valeri Nistratov, whose work was also published in Foto & Video, describes the 90s in Moscow as both “a breath of fresh air and a time of despair” for photographers as they were “realizing that everything had already been done before us in the West.” Yet it was still an unprecedented moment in Russian history for those looking to create something new. “There was no established art market or media environment, but there were spaces where, without any censorship, it was possible to exhibit our work.”
Sovetskoe Foto, which was founded in 1926 and ran until 1991, was the only major photography magazine that existed in Russia before Foto & Video. By contrast it was a far more conservative publication, operating within the realm of socialist realism. However, the design of the magazine was cluttered: five or more photos could fill up a single page. Innovative young photographers were given minimal coverage by the Soviet-era magazine or weren’t printed in at all, especially those from the peripheral reaches of the Soviet Union. If you wanted to get published in Sovetskoe Foto you had to know the right people and tow the party line.
Kiyan endeavored to counteract that legacy by removing political ideology from his own publication and actively seeking out young talent to print in the pages of Foto & Video alongside established greats from the West. “I knew that I had to give space to my peers,” he said. “I didn’t care where they were from, be it Latvia or Russia.” The design of Foto & Video’s inside pages was much more minimalistic, never including more than two photographs per page.
Yet the road to success was not without its setbacks. Kiyan would often find himself in meetings with Butler and Andreyev that would transform into arguments raging well past midnight, convincing them to take certain steps that would guarantee Foto & Video’s success. Andreyev, for his part, wanted to play a larger editorial role in the magazine, which Kiyan objected to, mostly because Andreyev’s ideas—like adding descriptions underneath each photograph—contradicted his minimalist design approach. Behind the scenes, Butler and Andreyev were asking people if they thought Kiyan was fit for the job due to his youth. “I suspect that I was too independent-minded for their liking,” mused Kiyan. Eventually they acknowledged that he knew what he was doing, and ceded full editorial control.
The magazine had its first major breakthrough in 1997. Legendary American fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon agreed to let Foto & Video print his work. The decision seemed to be a major victory for Kiyan, but when it was time to print, one of the magazine’s designers botched the sizing and coloring of Avedon’s photos. “To say I was upset wouldn’t even begin to describe it. I understood that I had let down a photographer I deeply respected. I turned off my computer, left the office, and told myself that I was finished,” Kiyan recalled how he felt after having received the magazine proofs. The photographer sent Kiyan a long fax to express his disappointment, which the editor hung over his desk as a reminder never to make the same mistake again. The designer was fired, and this led to a tradition where Kiyan would send each new issue of the magazine to the great Western photographers, even building up a friendly correspondence with some of them, such as Irving Penn. Avedon, in Kiyan’s words, was a warm and generous soul, allowing Foto & Video to publish his work four more times when he noted the magazine’s progress.
In the following years, Foto & Video introduced other legendary photographers to its audience, including Jeanloup Sieff, Sarah Moon, Paolo Roversi, Ellen von Unwerth, and Helmut Newton.Why did these Western photographers, whose works had been published in the top magazines worldwide, give such unprecedented access to the editor-in-chief of a then-relatively unknown photography magazine in Russia? When asked this question, Kiyan could only wager that it was the reckless abandon afforded by his youth. “I was too young to think that I shouldn’t do it,” he said, “but that’s what probably amazed them and led them to think they should work with us.”
Kiyan landed his first big face-to-face interview with David Bailey, the English fashion and portrait photographer. “I would be obliged to give you an interview,” he cordially responded to Kiyan’s request in the summer of 1999. The young editor-in-chief was overjoyed, not only being an admirer of Bailey’s photographs but also having seen Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary film Blowup (1966), which was inspired by the photographer’s life. At first, the British Embassy denied Kiyan a visa to travel to the United Kingdom, so he returned with a letter of invitation from Bailey himself. Upon being asked the purpose of his visit at Gatwick airport that September, Kiyan proudly declared to the wide-eyed astonishment of the border patrol officer: “I’m here to interview Mr. Bailey!” Before the interview itself, Kiyan traced the route from his hotel to the London East End studio to combat his nerves. As Bailey’s assistant ushered him inside, Kiyan overheard the photographer shout “Where’s that fucking Russian?” to which he declared with a cheerful wave: “Here’s that fucking Russian!”
Following the success of the Bailey interview, Kiyan would go on to interview Paolo Roversi, the renowned Italian fashion photographer in 2001; he would meet face-to-face with Hiro, Richard Avedon’s most famous protege, and Gordon Parks, the first black photographer to be published by Vogue, both in 2000; and Elliot Erwitt, the French-born American photographer in 2002. The magazine was being sold not only in Russia but neighboring countries, including Kiyan’s native Ukraine. It was, by all means, the ultimate success story: the young man from Kharkiv who had arrived in Moscow with nothing built a cultural touchstone for the entire post-Soviet space.
However, troubled business dealings behind the scenes would eventually bring it all down.
In October of 2004, tax inspectors showed up at the office of Foto & Video. This in itself was not a strange occurrence — they usually stopped by once every two years — but this time, all of the staff’s mobile phones were confiscated. Kiyan was preparing to travel to New York to conduct the biggest interview of his career: a sit down with Irving Penn, who had just agreed to grant his first interview in over twenty years. He arrived in the United States to a warm reception: “I thought I would be met by an old, bearded man!” declared Penn when he saw Kiyan.
After the interview, Kiyan received a phone call from Moscow that he was no longer the editor-in-chief of the magazine. Later on, the magazine’s color corrector told Kiyan that Andreyev had forged Butler’s signature on several important documents, leading to a rift between the two business partners. The deputy editor, acting more in line with Andreyev’s editorial vision, was installed as the new editor-in-chief. It was an abrupt end for Kiyan that left more questions than answers.
The last print edition of the magazine ran in 2015. When asked if he kept up with the magazine after his dismissal, Kiyan said that he had not even looked at the website because it was too painful. He settled down permanently in the United States and found work as a translator and teacher.
Valera and Natasha Cherkashin, the contemporary art duo, noted that: “In the immediate years following Dima’s dismissal, the magazine ran on materials that had presumably been accumulated by him. Then it became less and less interesting, turning into a purely technical magazine before it shut down.” The Cherkashins insist that Kiyan and Foto & Video were inextricably linked—without him, the magazine didn’t stand a chance. Other photographers evidently shared their view—when approached by the new editor-in-chief of the magazine with an offer to collaborate, Pavel Antonov rejected them.
Many photographers from the former Soviet sphere have not forgotten Kiyan’s great contributions to the photography world. The artist Mikhail Estafiev, who was working for Reuters’s Moscow desk as a photojournalist when they first met, is quick to praise his achievements: “In the 1990s, Foto & Video was perhaps the leading of its kind, mainly thanks to Dima's sincere passion for his work. He tirelessly generated new ideas, and in each issue he opened readers’ eyes to both Russian photographers and world-famous Western masters.”
Although Foto & Video is no more, with it Dmitry Kiyan shaped modern Russian photography as we know it today.
Kate Tsurkan is a writer, editor, and translator. She is the co-founder of Apofenie Magazine. Her previous work has been published in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Calvert Journal, Asymptote and Literary Hub.