Valery Shchekoldin

Russian photographer and documentarian.

 For decades he has captured everyday Soviet and post-Soviet life with a rare blend of irony, empathy, and precision. His work stands within the tradition of moral photography — art as conscience, memory, and quiet resistance to oblivion.
 Shchekoldin’s first major exhibition, “Moment of Truth” (Ulyanovsk, 1987), presented 437 photographs and became one of the earliest independent photographic statements to emerge from late Soviet provincial Russia. His images — neither overtly political nor propagandistic — revealed, with subtle clarity, the contradictions of a society on the brink of transformation.
 Through faces, gestures, and fragments of ordinary life, he continues to chronicle not only an era, but also the fragile dignity of those who inhabit it.