Photography has been Sichov’s passion since he was a teenager. He discovered that this was his true vocation when he was a student of engineering.
With his Soviet-designed Zenit camera, he takes pictures of everything he sees, even those things that he was forbidden to photograph. He worked for his own pleasure since he was unable to publish or exhibit his work.
Unofficial photography, street photography, was proscribed in the USSR.
He moved to Moscow in 1972 and became a photographer for publishing companies. With his wife, Aïda Hmeleva, he organized exhibitions of Russian painters in their flat in the center of Moscow.
Regarded as a dissident and under police surveillance, he eventually decided to leave his country with his wife and two children. He took with him more than 180,000 photographs. He was the first photographer from the Soviet Union to arrive in the West with archives consisting of images of daily life in the USSR
Photographs and material from the author’s donation to: Josep M. Farré Padrós.
