Farit Gubaev

Farit Saitovich Gubaev was born in Kazan, then in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, on 15 July 1951. He was Tatar by nationality and grew up without his father, living in a factory barracks in the years after the war. He loved books and music, especially The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. His mother gave him a Smena camera when he started school, a gift he later said had decided his future.

As a boy he wanted to be a writer and later hoped to study film direction at VGIK in Moscow, but that did not happen. In 1968, aged 17, he joined the Kazan photo club Volga. From 1970 to 1973 he worked as an assistant camera operator at the Kazan television studio, and in 1976 he graduated from the journalism department of Kazan State University.

In 1975 Gubaev co-founded the photo group TASMA and chaired it for a number of years. Working against the official style of the time, the group focused on truthful documentary photography and played a large part in reviving photography as a fine art in the city, giving rise to what became known as the Kazan school of photography. His long hair, beard and jeans were said to irritate party officials.

From 1975 to 1979 he was a correspondent and executive secretary at the republican youth newspaper Komsomolets Tatarii, and from 1979 to 1991 he was a photojournalist at Vechernyaya Kazan, joining the paper in its first year. In 1991 he moved to Moscow, where he worked for the newspaper Rossiya, served as photo editor of the magazine Obozrevatel, headed the exhibitions department of the Photo Centre of the Union of Journalists of Russia and worked with Ogonyok. He returned to Kazan in 1996 and contributed photo reports and articles about other photographers to the magazine Kazan from 2001 to 2021.

He co-authored the album Russia: 100 Years of History in Photographs (New York, 1994), later published in ten countries, and compiled or authored albums including Soviet Tatarstan (1980), Tatarstan: Portrait of a Contemporary (2006 to 2007), Holy Bolgar (2016), Kazan: Paris (2019) and Victory: One for All (2020). His first personal album, The Art of Presence, published in 2022, gathered more than two hundred photographs from fifty years of work, and a documentary film of the same name about him was presented in 2023.

He worked in reportage, portrait, landscape and still life, and preferred black and white for its drama and documentary quality. Critics singled out his Sabantuy series, made over more than twenty years, and his late 1980s pictures of the Solovetsky Islands. He was a member of the Union of Journalists of the USSR from 1976, the Union of Photo Artists of Russia from 1991 and the Union of Artists of Russia from 2019, and in 2012 he became head of the artistic council of the Union of Photographers of Tatarstan.

During one Sabantuy festival in Kazan, Gubaev was knocked down by a horse and broke his legs. He needed several joint operations and nearly lost the ability to move, but recovered and kept working. He had a daughter. In his later years he lived in Spain.

Farit Gubaev died of illness in Spain on 25 October 2026, aged 75. His death was confirmed to the newspaper Respublika Tatarstan by people close to him and reported on 26 October. The Tatarstan press and mass communications agency Tatmedia expressed condolences to his family and colleagues. Its head, Aidar Salimgaraev, said his homeland had always been at the centre of his work and that Gubaev had made a huge contribution to making Tatarstan and Russia known to the world. Funeral arrangements had not been reported.

Gubaev is remembered as a co-founder of TASMA and of the Kazan school of photography, and as a photographer who chronicled Tatarstan over half a century, from Soviet daily life to the Sabantuy festival and portraits of war veterans. His honours included the title Honoured Art Worker of the Republic of Tatarstan (2002), prizes at the Crystal Pen journalism competition in 2007 and 2008, the Golden Pen of Russia award (2023) and the medal for the centenary of the Tatar ASSR (2023). In 2023 he was nominated for the Tukay State Prize of Tatarstan for his photographic cycles about the republic.