With a little help from Russian mafia cash Alex Proud has established one of the capital’s best photo galleries. He talks to Dan Carrier

THE Proud Camden Gallery was funded by cash taken from the Russian Mafia.
So claims owner Alex Proud, the 35-year-old gallery chief who has, in the space of six years, set up London’s premier photography gallery in the heart of Camden Town. According to numbers through the turnstiles, the former warehouse in Greenland Street is the most popular of its kind in Europe.
But the money came from a business deal with shadowy mob characters from the former Soviet Union. He started dating a Russian supermodel, a Vogue cover girl who is so well known he refuses to divulge who she is – and it was this relationship that led to the establishment of the Proud Gallery.

Orchestras, opera houses, classical concert halls. Elitist, the lot of them. Once content to drain the public purse, they now also insist on leaching a disproportionate share of the National Lottery fund so that a privileged minority can park their well-upholstered behinds on subsidised seats.
This is a well-practised argument and one which a substantial percentage of the public and many in the media subscribe to.

LAST year, TV newsman turned arts boss Sir John Tusa travelled to the Czech Republic, where he was born, for BBC Radio 3.
At a concert to mark the 150th anniversary of the composer Leos Janacek, he recalls: “I looked around and thought, if my family hadn’t left in 1939, I would have been part of that audience.” But this warm conjecture was followed by the considerably more uncomfortable one that the Tusas had nearly chosen to go not to England but South Africa, “in which case, would I have ended up as a terrible white supremacist?” Sir John asks.