Dmitry Shad is a fine art photographer and body painting artist based in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Before turning to photography, he spent over a decade in medicine, serving as principal investigator on international clinical trials, and led and wrote music for a death metal band. Photography had been a parallel practice since his early twenties; after 2019 it became his main work. His series Under the Black Sun has been exhibited in over thirty countries. In 2025, his solo exhibition opened at the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art in Saint Petersburg. His work has been shown on more than 5,000 digital billboards worldwide, including Times Square in New York, through the Artcrush program, and has received over seventy international awards.

Everyone lives with their own demons. People are afraid of them, avoid them. I want to show their dark beauty — to show that we can learn to recognize and embrace what lives inside us, before it consumes us.

Under the Black Sun is a series about the place inside a person where the demons live, beneath a black sun, and about those who live there. These figures are how I imagine the feeling of solitude: at first it frightens you, then you start to see its strange beauty, and finally it becomes a source of strength you can no longer live without.