- Rerikh was good. Really good.
Yet ! You surpassed him…


The above comment is what art critics and artists say about the work of Sergey Melnikoff. It seems that Nature itself favors this master of photographic art and lavishes on him extraordinary opportunities to create photographs that are unique in their splendor, power and conviction. These days numerous people talk about a legendary traveler and photographer, and about how mysteriously the lens of his camera captures that special moment that offers the essence of beauty of our planet.

The entire life of this artist was spent on never-ending roads of India, Tibet, Pamir, Hindu Kush; then on the pilgrimage over the inner sacrum areas of Ladakh, Bhutan, Mustang, Sikkim, Kashmir; then on his passage to the enigmatic world of yoga in the Himalayan monasteries. All this exceptional experience brought the magic and the mystique into the work of the Maestro.

When he creates, an unidentifiable wave of nature’s splendor seems to flow out of his photographs. It appears that the Earth empowers this artist with all her supremacy in their common mission to preserve an eloquent and graphic treasure of the planet for future generations. Perhaps, the Earth gracefully grants wishes of this earthling since he is initiated into her higher enigmas?

Unique artwork, created by Sergey Melnikoff, have found their honored place among the collections of His Holiness Dalai Lama, former President of the US George W. Bush, the King of Nepal, the Sultan of Brunei, His Holiness the Patriarch of all Georgia Ilya-II, and many other celebrities.

That being said, the accomplished artist claims that he is not a classical photographer. He asserts that, even though in his creative work, more often than not, he resorts to unique equipment, and employs special assistants and aircraft to take a single photograph, he, nevertheless, relies primarily on two things – a basic knowledge of photography (which he actually never studied) and the trust in his own convictions and intuitive sense.

– I am looking forward to the day when Nature will give birth to what I want to show in a photograph, – says the artist.

Having received three college degrees, the artist made a decision to leave this worldly life behind and, with a camera in his hands, disappeared on the dusty roads of Asia in search of the meaning of life.

He became known as “eternal traveler”. Drawn to the beauty of Nature’s monuments, he chases the sun across the globe. He also became a source of a persistent rumor that says that this highland photographer has a gift to disperse a solid blanket of clouds in the sky, and can make the sun and the cloud cooperate to color white snow with the hues he wants. The rumor has it that he is even capable of ceasing the pouring rain at that very moment, when his massive camera is on the tripod, and he is ready to capture the timeless beauty of the surrounds.

These stories are passed around by many well-known climbers, who happened to come across a man carrying his ten-kilogram camera to impossible heights of various snow-steeped peaks of the world. Similar tales about this crusader are also narrated by the journalists who were fortunate to partake in his extraordinary expeditions.

Quite a few prominent names in the history of photography became a part of its legacy. All the known creators of today were once pioneers and became founders of entire schools of photographic art. It is easy to become famous, even notorious, when traveling on an unexplored path. Sergey Melnikoff chose the toughest way. He decided to find his talent in landscape photography – the supreme test for a photographer – where the competition is more than abundant, where one famous name piles upon another, and where, it seems, there is no place left for a novice.

But our Maestro succeeded. His artwork, though still in a whisper, yet more and more often, is put into an unparallel category of its own. Art MELNIKOFF is increasingly being formed into a separate school of photography.

The metaphysics of Sergey Melnikoff’s photographs is truly something elusive, incomprehensible. It is not just something that rests entirely upon his personalized Fuji equipment, with his name engraved on it, or upon the mastery of natural light “arrangement”, heliofilters and photomaterials, and all kinds of inventive paraphernalia prefixed by the word “photo”.

Instead, Sergey Melnikoff’s artwork is something irrational, with a strong aftertaste of the clandestine and the mysterious – precisely the two concepts that comprise the uniqueness of his creative work. He is a photographer who can feel at once the lure of the beauty and the call of the truth.

The word is “to relish” – which is what you may well do with this treasury of photographic art. Art MELNIKOFF – is an inimitable “music” of photography.

Welcome to the Maestro’s website!