About

Ivan Uralsky

Street photographer from Minsk, now based in Valencia, Spain. Photographing since 2003.

I started with a fifty-dollar keychain camera and old lenses taped to the front of it, photographing frozen drops of water in my kitchen sink. Classic black and white street photography meant nothing to me then — I couldn’t see what people found in it. Alexander Lapin’s book on how to read a photograph changed that. I read it several times, started going to museums, and learned the language before trying to say something of my own.

Reportage came next. In 2007 I travelled for a magazine through fields, villages and collective farms. Later I photographed football, hockey and tennis for a sports portal, worked as club photographer for FC Partizan Minsk, covered the 2014 Ice Hockey World Championship in Minsk, and spent time as a studio photographer at a branding agency. Sport taught me speed, and that the editor wants the goal, not the beautifully blurred crowd. I kept the blurred crowd for myself.

Street photography is when nothing happens, and you make a world out of it. I walk with the camera switched on, through the underpasses, stations and streets where people hurry, and wait for the moment something inside says: now. It is a kind of excitement — I know a frame has worked before I have seen it.

I photograph only in public space. I don’t photograph grief or people in distress, and if someone asks me to delete a picture, I do. I work in black and white because it takes a photograph slightly out of time.

My photographs have been published in books, newspapers, magazines and on billboards. In 2019 the series “Approaching” became my first solo exhibition, at Lestnitsa Gallery in Minsk.