Nikolai Bakharev is a Soviet and Russian photographer, recognised in Russia and abroad. In 2013, he participated in the main project of the 55th Venice Biennale entitled “The Encyclopedic Palace”. The event was curated by Massimiliano Gioni, an art critic and director of the New Museum exhibition programme in New York. In 2011, Gioni presented Nikolai’s work to the New York public at the “Ostalgia” show, one of the top 10 exhibitions of the year. In 2015, Bakharev was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize, a prize for photographers who have made a contribution to the art of photography. Zanele Muholi, Mikael Subotsky, Patrick Waterhouse and Viviane Sassen received the nomination as well.

Bakharev has deconstructed the standards and taboos of Soviet morality, where there was no place for sexuality: by showing the aesthetics and the beauty of a naked body, he created portraits not just of people, but of time and place, assembling an intimate photographic archive of a bygone era.

In the 1970s photographers of the film and photo studio of the Kuznetsk Metallurgical Plant created the association “TriVa”, it became the founder of the Novokuznetsk school of photography, its principles were always based on the  authenticity and non-interference in the documentation. Nikolai Bakharev worked as a fitter at the same metallurgical plant until 1970, then, working as a photographer in the Novokuznetsk household service (an organisation of Soviet republican ministries providing various services to the population), he began to take commissions: photographing holidaymakers on the city beach and in the open air. Subsequently, he moved on to individual commissions, the results were naive in their frankness and infinitely valuable in their sincerity: the awkward poses of the models, the unpretentious Soviet everyday life, which the portrait subjects themselves sought to aestheticise, Bakharev conveyed as it was, capturing the authenticity of the moment of self-representation of the models.

Bakharev’s series can be distinguished into public (“Typages”, “Relationships”), and private (“In the Interior”, “The Couch”), in the latter the images seem not to be intended for display, and the scenography of the shot looks amateurish, but it is developed in detail together with the model.  Nikolai Bakharev’s work can be described as a social portrait, where he crosses the boundary of “portrait in the interior” or “plein air”, exposing the model. For Bakharev, subtle eroticism becomes an authorial method, where explicit corporeality conveys the optics of the author, who spent hours and even days building a trustful relationship with the model in order to convey not only the external, physical, but also the internal: the intimate world and psychological portrait of a personality.