Boris Savelev (b. 1947) was a leading member of a group of independent photographers working in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. He was the first non-official photographer published outside the Soviet Union (Secret City, London: Thames and Hudson, 1988). He resided in Moscow, returning in 2010 to his native Czernowitz in Ukraine, where he lived until he moved to Spain as a refugee at the start of the 2022 conflict.

If the role of art is to allow you to see and experience the world through the eyes of another person, then Boris Savelev is a great artist providing access to an important time; from the end of the USSR system, through a period of optimism and hope to the realization that cycles repeat.

Savelev’s extraordinary photographic work has earned him a place in major international collections worldwide. Among them are the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, the Saarland Museum in Saarbrucken, the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, The Art Institute of Chicago, and many other major institutions and private collections.

In the summer of 2022, with the help of his long-time friend and collaborator, Adam Lowe (director of Factum Arte and founder of the Factum Foundation) Boris Savelev and his wife Natalia moved to Madrid. Boris worked on the production of these portfolios in Factum Arte, while watching the bloodshed in Ukraine.

Adam Lowe and Factum Arte have published several portfolios of Boris Savelev’s images and have worked since 1995 to create a full archive of exhibition prints that have brought Savelev’s vision to a wide audience.

If you wish to purchase a portfolio, please write to factum@factum-arte.com