History of Russian Photography

July 2 – August 31, 2004

In July and August, Anahita Gallery will mount a very large exhibition, a History of Russian Photography, beginning in the romantic, Imperial Age and culminating in the rigorous formalism of contemporary Moscow photography. The arts in Russia and the Soviet Union were strongly influenced and often strictly controlled by the government, and the exhibition is organized around the changes in artistic style that accompanied the radical political transformations that have taken place in Russia in the last 125 years.

The years of Empire were a time of Russian fascination with newly conquered border regions; photography became a means of possessing these far-flung colonial territories. The romanticized and documentary images of natives of the period contrast in the exhibition with European style portraiture and cabinet photographs.

At the end of the Czarist era, the Pictorialist work of the artists Grinberg, Yeremin and Ulitsky used painterly effects in a self-conscious attempt to raise photography to the status of an accepted art form.

The teens through the 1920s were a period of experimentation and radical changes in the arts. Initially, there were serious attempts to build a revolutionary artistic style to match the Revolutionary times. Challenging compositions were shot from unexpected angles, and a complete change of subject matter focusing on the roles of workers, industry and the modernization of society contributed to the Utopian vision in early Soviet photography in the works of Max Penson, Georgi Zelma, Ivan Shagin and others.

The early Soviet artistic experimentation was codified under Stalin into a rigorously official style called Socialist Realism. The work of artists, especially photographers, was directed entirely to the valorization of the ruler and the ruling State. All the artistic groups were merged into one official union, controlled and directed from above. Both Formalism and Naturalism (which the Soviets defined as too much specificity, too much attention biological detail, instead of the generic heroism that celebrated the Soviet State) were banned.

During World War II, photographers were given much greater freedom to photograph the war with greater realism, taking pictures of what they actually saw. Not many of the photographs were allowed publication in during the war, but they demonstrate the artistic strengths concealed beneath the regimentation of official photography.

Under Khrushchev, during the Thaw, there was increasing interest in creating a more lively, less rigid style, but instead of permitting a real regeneration in the arts, some of the artistic styles of the early Revolutionary period were revived. A few of the remaining, old, artists were even brought back, but the subjects and goals remained the same.

By the 1960s and 1970s, a few brave photographers began to work outside of the official Soviet system, scrounging paper and equipment, and showing their work to their friends in exhibitions in their tiny apartments.

One of the most influential, Alexander Slyusarev, gathered followers to form an early grouping of underground or non-official photographers, among them, the young Boris Savelev, Igor Mukhin, Sergei Gitman and others. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union hese artists have become the recognized masters and pioneers of the first truly modern Russian photography.