Yermakov was born in Tiflis in 1846, the son of the Italian architect Luigi Caribaggio and a Georgian mother of Austrian descent.

She remarried the Russian Ermakov whose surname her son Dmitry took.

Trained as a military topographer, he took part in the Russo-Turkish War (1877–1878).

He traveled extensively as far as Iran and participated in several archaeological expeditions in the Caucasus, leaving a series of unique photographs.

These photographs document the lifestyles, customs and costumes of Russian people in the late 19th-century forming an important ethnographic record of the region and its inhabitants.