Igor Palmin was born in 1933 in Volgograd. He graduated from the State University of Voronezh and in the early
1950s began to work in photography. He later received training in photography at the All-Union Institute of Cinema.
In the late 1960s he worked in television and became familiar with several Moscow and Leningrad artists of the
underground. He began to assemble a photographic archive of unofficial Russian art. In the 1970s he worked for the
publishers Sovetskii khudozhnik and Iskusstvo.
Palmin’s photographs are some of the most important documents of the post-Stalinist period of underground
culture and provide a narrative of the development of alternative culture in Russia.
Palmin has published numerous books on the history of contemporary art, published in both Russia and the West.
He lives in Moscow.
