Gennadiy Chernomashintsev – I was born in USSR in 1968, now live in Ukraine.  I work as art director in DOMINO magazine (Ukrainian magazine) and as freelance fashion photographer.  

I always like photography. I mean I like this images in fashion magazine , beautiful  fashion b/w ad etc. In my childhood I had a great Soviet camera ФЕД . It was a really great  rangfinder camera russian clone of leica. My father bought it for me. It was magic.

I used to work as film director for many years, mostly in commercial and music video. Then I decided to switch on photography because I was quite bored with a big crew (and also because working on video fields means waking up early . But actually I prefer working without assistants, big lighting set-ups and grips.

I have always been inspired by Helmut Newton, Jean loup Sieff and Ralph Gibson. High contrast, grainy images.. I like it. Usually I shoot very fast that’s why I prefer to work with professional models so always . Nude photographers now are in big trouble now because the border between pornography and nude photo is blurred. But for me nude photography is not about sex, it’s about beauty so I still find nude photography is one of the most influential in photo area. I simply dislike color. And I think that black and white photography is something timeless. Just take look at photos of 50-60^th. Technologies change all the time but these images are eternal and still evoke the same feelings. You must know the history of photography and get inspired by great photographers. And the most important is just to be yourself. You must be a person first of all. Read good books, watch good movies and listen to good music. And don’t read photography blogs. Never .

I started working digitally recently. My current camera Leica MP9 and I use 35/1.4 lens. Almost all my works were created with Leica M6.  Even working digitally I don’t spend plenty of time doing post-processing. I’m trying to stay close to analogy process, don’t look at the camera screen, do the same amount of frames as it was on film and I also wait for a couple of days before starting post-processing…  I don’t use lighting setups and prefer available light.