The Russian artist and photographer Grigori Galitsin was born in Razdelnaya near Odessa at the Black Sea in 1957. He studied classical painting at the art academy in St Petersburg. Today he lives and works in Volgograd. Galitsins grandfather gave him his first camera, one of the first Leica models, which hed bought from the German army in 1947. Galitsin soon turned away from academic painting: photography had captured him under its spell. Galitsin was able to pursue entirely new paths when Perestroika arrived and Russia opened to the West in the early 1990s. Like-wise decisive for him was the speedy evolution of the Internet, which enabled him to debut his sensitive, erotic portraits of Russian girls world-wide online in 1996. The success was overwhelming. His photographic style is not a copy of Western patterns, but results instead from his creative and unconventional exploration of one of the most popular themes in art: the depiction of the female body. Although Galitsins models are all of legal age, his photographs of these young, nymph-like girls radiate an aura of playful innocence and enchanting naturalness. To our great delight, it seems that tattoos and piercing havent yet found their way to faraway Russia. Grigori Galitsin (www.galitsin-news.com) numbers among Russia's foremost contemporary photographers.