World photography highlights #4 Russia

      It was 1839 when photography was first introduced to Russia, when Russian Academy of Sciences, Josef Gamel, went to England to meet Talbot to get firsthand experience with methods of capturing images.

William Henry Fox Talbot,, 1843

William_Henry_Fox_Talbot1864

After visiting Jacques Daguerre and making Daguerreotypes, Josef returned to Russia with the first photographic equipment.

Louis_Daguerre

Daguerreotype

Louis Daguerre, Boulevard du Temple, Paris, photograph, 1839

Russian photographer Alexey Grekov was the first in the world to use copper and brass plates in Daguerreotypes which in turn made these cameras more assessable to a wider spectrum of photographers.
Another first was Sergei Levizky’s use of objects in several different posses, using variations of background and clothes etc and the retouching of his negatives to make the just right.

The Iron Curtain tightly isolated it from the international art life. The only genre which was socially encouraged inside the country was social realistic photojournalism which was a slave of totalitarian government system. This however made unique in photographic history, producing powerful symbolism and glorifying many of the achievements of the Soviet state and its socialist lifestyles.

In the early 1990’s American edited publications such as Photostroika(Aperture,1989) and Photo Manifesto(by Joseph Walker, 1991) described Russian photography as newly born, these publications read as in to say that the photography from 1930-1990 was artless and repressed. 
The very complex visual history was obliterated and instead Russian photography in this period was said to be and experiment. It was like these publications where saying the Russian photography never really happened, this however was far from the truth. When Communism fell, Russian photography became part of the international arena again. Rather than photography being that of photojournalism during the Soviet era, serving as a tool for propaganda for the state.
 Russian photography now got more support and with the help of PerestroÏka, gained its own underground art culture where the individual photographer took over from the collective and photography was reinvented with new themes and forms.

So from the early days of Russian photography with its invention of raw documentive style photography, there is now all manner of highly creative photographers. Below are just a few photographers that I feel represent Russian photography for me. 

Karl Bulla  (b.1853-1929)

Karl was a prominent photographer and is very often referred to as the “father of photo-reporting in Russia”

Bulla

Rasputin

Oleg Poleschuk  (b.1936-1997)

Yuri Eremin  (b.1881-1941)

Yuri was known as being a Pictorialist photographer and most of his work reflects this. His photography shows more the abstract emotion of a scene rather than a straight forward representation.  He achieved this by manipulation of both the lens and/or by crating various effects in the dark room. 

Oleg Dou    (b.1983)

Oleg comes from an artistic family, his mother was a painter and his father was a dress designer, and so was always surrounded by artists and alike. When he was 13 he was given a computer and an early copy of Photoshop and started immediately to transform his friends, family and school teacher’s faces.

Oleg was discovered in 2006 and now his work can be found in galleries in France, Spain, Russia, Belgium, Netherlands and United States as well as appearing in many international publications.

His work is also now featured on the box of Adobe’s Photoshop CS6. He uses photography, post-production and various other techniques to create his alluring, graceful and sometimes eerie portraits. 

Peter Tooming  (b.1939-1997)

Peter was a photographer who used photography and film-making to achieve his artistic subjectivity and expression.  He would use and tweak many forms of chemical techniques such as the use of filters, using infrared film and experiment with many types of photochemistry to achieve his views on subjectivity and expression in photography.

Tooming said “A photographer has the right to make use of the recording of a fact but also one of the forms of expression of an artist”

Tooming studied journalism at Tartu State University in Estonia from 1968 to 1974. He was active as a filmmaker between 1961 and 1994, becoming a member of the Society of Cinematographers of the USSR and the director of photography at Tallinnfilm Film Studio in Estonia in 1963. He produced over 120 individual exhibitions and participated in over 300 international photo contest and exhibit. He has earned the AFIAP 's gold medal.

 Written by Paul Casey Hemming 

@ Big World Picture Dot Com
Автор: Пол Кейси Хемминг
@ Big картины мира Dot Com


Please feel free to add any thoughts or comments below.

Hover your pointer over left contents column then use your scroll wheel or button to view more posts.