Yevgeniy Pavlov took his first steps in art in the late 1960s, and by 1971, along with his friend Jury Rupin, had already established Vremia (Time), a group of avant-garde Kharkiv photographers (Boris Mikhailov, Oleh Maliovany, Anatolii Makiienko, Oleksandr Sytnychenko, Oleksandr Suprun, and Hennadii Tubalev). The groups arrival marked the beginning of the phenomenon of the Kharkiv school of photography, known for its blow theory. For a long time it was the only active center of the photo avant-garde in Ukraine.