Born in Luhansk, Eastern Ukraine, Alexander Chekmenev's early work focused on people affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1997, he moved to Kiev, where he currently works as photojournalist. His work has been published in New York Times Lens Blog, Time Magazine and Time Light Box, New Yorker Photo Booth, MSNBC, Quartz, The Guardian, Vice Magazine, Liberation. In December 2022, at the Forbes Ukraine charity auction in Kyiv, his portrait of President Volodymyr Zelensky, taken for the cover of TIME magazine, was sold for $150, 000. The money went to charity to purchase generators for 100 children's institutions that had suffered during the war.