ALERT: Content is protected!
At nineteen, Artem Shestakov left Ukraine for Brazil on what was meant to be a two-week trip. He stayed several years, travelling through the country's interior with a camera he had barely learned to use.
Brazil is where the work started. The landscapes were bigger than anything he had photographed, and learning to make them legible in a single frame took years of failure before it took hold.
Shestakov works almost entirely in remote landscape, shooting on a Hasselblad X2D — a 100-megapixel medium format camera that resolves detail at a scale most cameras cannot hold. The files are large enough to print at wall scale without losing the texture of snow, water, or bare rock.
His method is slow. A single image often means days of waiting for weather, light, or a break in the ice. The frames that survive editing are a small fraction of what he shoots.
Shestakov's photography has been recognized in international competition. "Hidden Arch," a limestone arch on Prince of Wales Island in Alaska, took Gold in Nature Photography at the 2022 MUSE Photography Awards, and his work took Gold at the 2023 Tokyo International Foto Awards.
In 2023 he produced The Perfect Shot: Antarctica, a ten-minute documentary directed by Quinn Halleck about his attempt to photograph one of the most remote places on earth. It won Best Documentary Short Film at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival Awards and the Jury Prize for Best International Short Documentary at the Yellowstone International Film Festival.
The work has taken him to more than thirty countries, including Antarctica, South Georgia, Alaska, and the Swiss Alps. In Antarctica he filmed The Perfect Shot: Antarctica, a short environmental film about photographing one of the last places on earth largely unaltered by people.
He is based on Florida's Gulf Coast and travels most of the year.
