Dmitry Shad is a fine art photographer and body painting artist based in Saint Petersburg, Russia. A physician by training, he spent over a decade in medicine. Photography had been a parallel practice since his early twenties; in 2019 it became his main work. His series Under the Black Sun has been exhibited in over thirty countries, and 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 fear them and 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.
The series is about a place inside a person where the demons live, beneath a black sun, and about those who live there. My characters 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.
Where the Demons Come From
I came to this subject from several directions at once. Before photography became my main work, I spent years as a physician and as an investigator in international clinical trials. Medicine taught me to see the body as a structure — bone, muscle, tendon, skin.
For several years I owned a tattoo studio and worked closely with tattoo artists. There I learned to see skin differently: not only as an organ, but as a canvas. I was also the guitarist of a death metal band and wrote its music, which made darkness familiar to me as material for art rather than something to hide.
At home I kept spiders, scorpions, centipedes, snakes and a crocodile. Creatures that most people find repulsive or frightening have always seemed beautiful to me. This is the core of what I do: I want to show dark and frightening things through beautiful images — not to soften them, but to let the viewer see what I see in them.
I have always lived more in my inner world than among other people. The figures in this series come from there. Under the Black Sun is where all of these experiences meet.
I began Under the Black Sun in 2019. The series now includes more than 80 images. It remains open: new figures appear as long as there are demons left to give a body to.