In less then twenty years, between his graduation from Moscow University until his sudden and untimely death, Alexandr Victorov became a great master of Russian photography of the late 20th century. Although he left us as his gift was blossoming, and could have done much more, he nevertheless achieved a great deal with his talent. It is hard, if not impossible, to compare him with any other master. Alexandr Victorov was absolutely independent, very deep, and a highly intellectual artist. He perceived photography as one of the great arts and he used to say that it was subject to strict rules, similar to the harmony of classical music. His photographs are notable not only for their high technical quality, but also their perfect composition and pure taste. Alexander Victorov possessed a god-given vision of the world, and he was loyal to this vision regardless of the type of photography he did. He did not want to and, it seems, could not change it. This vision was a precise reflection of his world: the world of his soul, in the middle of Moscow’s vanity, at working routine and holidays striving for excellency with painful vulnerability, a sensitive and, at the same time, severe tenderness. He understood excellency to be maturity, regularity and balance created by God. In his words about art there was a belief that ugliness is a sin, distortion of the fate and that the primitive harmony should be restored and put back in order. In fact, Alexander Victorov created this abstract and beautiful world, a world almost without people, which he saw frozen for a moment in a harmonic order where he had succeeded in “erasing all the haphazard traits” through the lense of his camera. In the history of photography he is an artist of the 1980-1990s, where he has a permanent place regardless of the passing fancy of fashion. However, Victorov never thought of himself as an artist of the late Soviet period, or “perestroika”. His creativity, manifested through photography using old and new cameras, stemmed from the very core of Russian culture, spiritually linked both with the Silver Age and earlier periods. He, in my view, was superior to his time, and especially the present time. He tried to create everlasting values through his are and I heard him say several times: “I am a photographer from a different era”. This could be the core of his activity: the creation of unchangeable and beautiful everlasting images, which are an ideal not open to all in this world. Today he is open to the viewer in all types of genre: in colour, in black and white, in figurative compositions, in his observations of landscape, and forms, in the images of Russian churches, palaces, halls and parks, disappearing old streets of Moscow. This is the first time that the creative activity of Alexander Victorov is represented in full on this site.

Dmitry Shvidkovsky

"...there is some bewitching sacrament - something from the endlessness of the universal scale, wich shadow the reality and wakes the dream. He managed to glance at the world so poetically, so disinterestedly and innocently, as if was its first comer... May be it was the light of landscapes from the heavently world..."

Alexandr Riumin

"... the photographs by Alecsander Victorov are the reflections of his talent: of the elaborate taste, typically Russian monumental lyricism and special musical feeling. The camera's lenses, his heart and brains were always on one direct line...This special trinity I undestend as a gift of God. Alecsandr Victorov, surely, had it..."

Nikolay Rakhmanov

"The black-and-white photo-works by Victorov - the world of Nature, seen with ' the closed eyes'. Exactly in this way the trees, stones and grass are looking when the conscience, sinking in itself, is fare from the vain suddens and closer to the 'first images', to the eidoses of the world. Alexander Victorov listens attentively to the voice of silence. His photographic suit remainds the philosophy of the Japanese garden: the meditative spase is looking into itself, never recognized, never known to the end..."

Sergey Hachaturov