The Work.
Looking back, I had always been doing one thing: trying to see what is true. The work presented in the order it happened.
Scroll down to view the galleries.
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Introduction to seeing the unseen in the world. A body of photographic work.
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Seeing the unseen in people. Looking for what unfolds when you dare to walk your life as you.
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A decade long journey of witnessing the truth in others.
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Social experiment turned into an art project during Pandemic.
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The ongoing practice of seeing creative genius in others.
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What started as an artistic exploration and led to the development of the DareMethod.
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The culmination of it all.
A solo show in New York City. Images of the city in the rain — the moments that are uncomfortable, unposed, not meant for picture taking. The moments most people look away from. Those were the moments of true beauty to me.
This was when I first understood my mission: to show the unseen to the world. I didn't know yet that the most unseen thing of all was inside me.
Nominee — Fine Art Photography Awards 2017, Street Photography
Umbrellas
If Umbrellas was about the unseen in the city, DareWalk was about the unseen in the person.
I added a human being to the streets of New York and walked alongside them — not to pose them, not to direct them, but to capture them as-is. In the moment of being, rather than performing. Their greatness, unstaged, reflected back through the lens.
In retrospect, I was already practicing the DareMethod. I just didn't have a name for it yet.
DareWalk
Not a performance. Not a photoshoot. An encounter with their own presence. I became exceptionally good at seeing people — really seeing them — in a way that allowed their truest selves to emerge in a single frame.
What I didn't notice, for a long time, was that I had become a master observer of everyone except myself.
Portraiture: Dare Séance
The pandemic stopped the world. It also, unexpectedly, opened something.
I invited people into studio sessions and listened. Then I did something unusual — I stripped the conversations of their portraits. No faces. Just voices. Just experiences. What remained were fifteen recurring threads of the human experience — disorientation, longing, resilience, connection — woven into soundscapes and shared with the world.
What the experiment revealed was simple and profound: detach from the image, and what is left is the truth.
All Is One
After the pandemic, I found myself sitting on the floor of a jazz club in New York. I looked at the pianist and suddenly saw it — a pure divine force working through a human being.
I have loved jazz since childhood — my father's friend playing on my sister's upright piano in our tiny apartment in Russia. But this was different. This was seeing something in another human being that they themselves might not have known was visible.
Jazz Photography
Not long after, I went on a meditation retreat. And I took a photograph of myself.
What I saw in that image stopped me. The same experience I had had on the floor of the jazz club — only this time, it was in my own face.
What if I invite a person into a studio and take a photo before a coaching session, during it, and after? What if they can see the difference with their own eyes?
The answer was yes. And that yes became the DareMethod.
Self-Image Project
Everything above was preparation for this.
The DareMethod uses the photograph as an instrument to witness yourself at the moment of emotional truth, and to return you to the self that has been waiting underneath the performed image.
Not analysis. Not talking about the past.
The most direct route I've found: your own face, met honestly, in real time.
This is what I built to meet the person who lived my life yesterday.
