Having two rival countries to call his home and feeling like an alien in both of them, Russian-American photographer Ilya Popenko explores the lines between national, collective and personal identities. His photography work ranges from street portraits, to cityscapes, to conceptual projects that involve models, carefully chosen locations, elaborate lighting and hyper realistic latex masks.
Ilya was born in 1980 in Moscow, Russia. In 1996 he immigrated to the USА where he graduated from Pratt Institute with a degree in photography and had been working in various fields of photography ever since. In the series of solo exhibitions that he had both in Russia and in the US in the past two years Ilya has been successful in combining his photography work, his large scale illustrations and performances by his music project Mad Meg.
