The real name of Arseny Semonoy is a Russian photographer and documentarian of Soviet monumental art of the 20th century. A traveler and blogger known on social media by the surname Kotov. Author of popular album books, published also abroad.

Arseny grew up and studied in Samara. After school, he entered Samara Aerospace University, which he graduated from in 2010. He then worked for three years as an engineer at the local Progress plant, where Soyuz rockets are assembled. According to him, the first year was amazing, just delightful: huge workshops, rockets, satellites. In the second year it seemed that something was already off. In the third year he began to think, “What a bore, one day is like the next.” At the same time, Semonoy loved to travel, and when the opportunity arose to rent out an extra apartment, he quit his job.

At first he set off with a hiking backpack through Crimea and Ukraine, and illegally went to Pripyat. Then there were countless other trips; he hitchhiked from St. Petersburg to Sakhalin, visiting all the cities along the way, rode in freight trains, and slept on roofs. Soviet architecture attracted him; he liked various mosaics, impressive monuments, and memorials. Because of this, he became interested in photography, although before that he had hardly ever even held a camera in his hands.

From an interview: ... architecture is the best thing in Russia and the post-Soviet countries. There is a sense of a unified plan in it. What is appealing is what a person envisioned, and what a person managed to make on a grand scale. I like immersing myself in the historical context; I usually do this before visiting some place. I deliberately go to the library, take books or magazines such as “Architecture of the USSR,” look through them, and choose where to go next.

... people are interesting to me too; I like showing them against some kind of background. Not just a person standing in a field, but so that a story can be read. Some striking backdrop that reflects scale, while the viewers work out the сюжет on their own. And it is not my job to decide what exactly they imagine.