Ivan Ivanovich Sychev
(1921−1994)
Ivan Ivanovich Sychev was born in 1921 in the village of Kayasan, Chelyabinsk region. In 1930, the Sychev family was dispossessed and evicted to the North. In 1937, Ivan Mikhailovich Sychev (Ivan Ivanovich’s father), a shoemaker of the Salekhard agricultural cartel, was arrested and shot.
From about this time, Ivan Sychev, who graduated from Salekhard Secondary School No. 1, became interested in photography. He put together his first camera with his own hands, learned how to take pictures, develop photographic films and print photos. It became his favorite hobby and the main thing for life.
In 1939, Ivan Sychev graduated from the Moscow State Photographic College and began working as a photojournalist for TASS. In 1941 he went to the front, in the battles near Moscow he was seriously wounded in the leg, after which he was commissioned and returned to Salekhard.
After the war, he received a construction education in Tyumen and worked in Salekhard in the engineering design and estimate Bureau of Construction No. 501 until its closure in 1955. Then he worked as a photographer in the Salekhard city Department of Culture, a photojournalist for the newspapers "Tyumen Truth" and "Red North". He also worked on assignments of publishing houses in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, Leningrad…
In 1989, the publishing house "Soviet Russia" published a 40-thousandth edition of a set of 17 postcards about the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug, consisting entirely of photographs by I.I. Sychev.
Ivan Ivanovich was a very hardworking, sociable and kind person who never parted with his cameras. He often went on business trips around the district, bringing a lot of pictures and impressions from each one. He was a lover of nature, hunting and fishing. Fragments of observations of nature are often present in his works.
He completed his photo archive in full confidence in its necessity and demand. He mastered new photographic equipment, went shopping in Moscow on purpose. It was he who had the first Nikon camera in Salekhard. It was he who started shooting here first on color large-format slide film. Ivan Ivanovich took part in regional, district, city photo exhibitions. He prepared photo albums, annually organized exhibitions of his photographs in the building of the district committee of the CPSU for the holidays of May 1, May 9 and November 7. He was also preparing for a big work dedicated to the 400th anniversary of Salekhard, but he didn’t have time…
In March 1994, the life of the veteran of the Great Patriotic War, photographer Ivan Ivanovich Sychev suddenly ended…
The funds of the I.S. Shemanovsky Moscow Art Museum have been storing printed photographs, black-and-white and color photographic films shot by I.I. Sychev since 1994. Some of them were published in regional and district newspapers, some became exhibits of museum exhibitions "Yamal of the twentieth century. The photoletop of Ivan Syichev" and "Stop, a moment".