Collecting

COLLECTING - CREATION OF A HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Rena Gvozdeva

The exhibitions of foreign photography, held in the last decade in Russia, the spring photo-festivals held since the mid-nineties in Moscow and the "autumn photo-marathons" in St.Petersburg at-tracted to photography constant and significant attention from the Russian public and media, so that photography became a part of contemporary fashionable culture.

It appears that photography as a fashionable phenomenon is a spontaneous explosion with no parallel in the history of Russian culture. This is not true. Future research will have to compare the cultural situations in Russia at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries and at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the country experienced mass interest in photography, associated with a multitude of photographic exhibitions, and this not only in St.Petersburg and Moscow, but also in provincial cities.

Precisely that time saw the origin of many works, which later became part of private photographic collections, in spite of the fact that the Soviet period of Russian history (1917-1991) with its rejection of private ownership and indifferent attitude to photography, typical of the cultural policy of the state, produced clearly unfavourable conditions for the formation of photographic collections.

The exhibition practice of the last decade enabled many own-ers of private collections to make themselves known. One of the most important collections is that of Mikhail Golosovsky.

This collection is 30 years old. Mikhail Golosovsky, a photographer and organizer of exhibitions of contemporary photography, began to collect the work of his colleagues, together with photographic equipment and literature, in the 1970s. A significant part of his collection of photographic equipment now forms the basis of the photographic part of the State Polytechnic Museum in Moscow (Gosudarstveny politechnichesky muzei). Golosovsky’s library contains more than 1500 works of photographic literature, beginning with the first Russian photographic publications from 1855-1856, and extending up to recent foreign catalogues with the participation of Russian authors. The collector’s interest lies mainly in the area of Russian photography.

Works from his collections were shown in Moscow at the exhibitions devoted to the 140th and 150th anniversaries of photography, and at exhibitions in Cologne and Oxford. In recent times, Golosovsky has created several exhibitions about the history of photography and monographic retrospectives of individual photographers, from his collection. One of them was held at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1996.

R.G.: "What led to you forming a collections? What were your aims?"

M.G.: "At about the beginning of the seventies, when I and my wife, the photographer Galina Lukyanova, still knew little about the history of photography, I received a copy of the magazine Sovetskoye Foto from the thirties, where the creative work of Yury Yeryomin, Nikolay Svishchov- Paola and others was criticized on the level of street abuse. Soon after, I saw the work of these photographers in the photographic club Novator, led by Alexander Khlebnikov, who himself belonged to the group of photographic artists from the twenties. Then I also got to know Alexander Grinberg, at that time a completely forgotten artist. The high culture, clear artistic achievements, and especially the spirit of a passed age filled me with enthusiasm. A whole layer of forgotten photographic culture emerged. There was very little information about the history of Russian photography from the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, but I had the great good fortune to meet the historians of photography Sergey Morozov and Anatoly Fomin. It is necessary to say that this was an education! At that time (in the seventies), the attitude to originals was rather indifferent, and if the works of photo- journalists were not damaged by this, they were sometimes not obtained at all, photographic artists were entirely lost. For me, there was no doubt: if I was going to understand an artist, I had to see the original. And that was the beginning."

Today, the collection of Mikhail Golosovsky contains materials about the history of Russian photography from the end of the 1830s to the present. A special feature of the collection is that it includes hardly any photo-journalistic materials. As the collector says, "why try and discover that which is already discovered?"

The collection is composed of four basic parts. The first is Russian photography of the 19th century, including the whole heterogeneity characteristic of the processes of this period (from daguerrotypes, albuminotypes to half-tone reproductions and chromolithography) and types (landscape, portrait, genre photography, still-lifes, pictures of the sea), as well as the most notable photographers. Photographs of architecture are a special part of this collection. Apart from famous names such as Grigory Nostits and Ivan Barshchevsky, it includes anonymous photographers, whose works are equal to those of their outstanding contemporaries, in complexity of composition and technical quality.

Another unusually interesting sub-group consists of ethnographic photography, so-called "types" of nations living in the Russian Empire: works of Viliam Karrik, Dmitry Nikitin and Dmitry Yermakov.

One of the jewels of the 19th century is the first photo-montage in the history of Russian photography - a portrait of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, produced at the beginning of the 1860s by the St.Petersburg photographer Sergey Levitsky.

The second parts consists of Russian pictorialist photography.

M.G.: "This is the main theme of the collection. Sadly, Russian pictorialist photography is not sufficiently known in the world, it is missing from studies devoted to the international photographic salons of the

years 1890-1930, although the Russian pictorialists actively participated in them, and names such as Alexey Mazurin, Sergey Lobovikov, Yury Yeryomin and Alexander Grinberg were very well known in the photographic circles of the time."

R. G.: "Today, the terms "artistic" and "pictorialist" photography are sometimes distinguished. What is the difference between them in your view?"

M.G.: "Each of them goes its own way. The visual difference lies especially in the greater creativity of pictorialist photography. With the aim of gaining recognition more rapidly, photography imitated painting, approached it and adopted its traditions - this was the origin of pictorialist photography. It was an inevitable process, affecting all countries: France and England, which had rich traditions of painting, but also America, where the traditions of painting and photography were equally young. In Russia, pictorialist photographers simultaneously worked as masters of artistic photography.

They were members of the same photographic communities. They lived and had their studios in the same cities, but especially in such cultural centres as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kharkhov, Vyatka and Nizhny Novgorod.

Sometimes only the circle of exhibitions and social contacts of a master, from end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, enables us to place him among the pictorialists or the "artists"."

The collection of pictorialist photography of Mikhail Golosovsky includes works by Sergey Lobovikov and Alexey Mazurin, Nikolay Andreev and Yury Yeryomin, Vasily Ulitin, Alexander Grinberg and Sergey Ivanov-Alliluev, whose names are known from monographic exhibitions. Apart from them, the collection includes works by Nikolay Yeliseev, Boris Podluzsky, Nikolay Svishchov-Paola, Anatoly Tropany, Leonid Shokin and other representatives of the pictorialist schools of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kharkhov, Vyatka and Kiev. These masters became well-known thanks to contemporary publications, but unfortunately, apart from Golosovsky’s collection, there are few places where originals of the refined works can be seen.

The third part is contemporary (1970s-1990s) photography in Russia. The collector knows many famous photographers, so we would expect to find their works in his collection. Although his collection includes works by Alexander Slyuzarev, Yelena Skibitskaya, Rita Ostrovskaya, Gennady Koposov, Alexander Saakov, whose names are added to the classic Soviet and Russian photography of earlier decades, Golosovsky mainly collects photographs and not the names of the people who took them.

And finally, the fourth part - Russian coloured photography, a little researched phenomenon, which occurs throughout the period of competition between painting and photography, combining their creative characters and enabling the origin of new nuances of meaning to the production of pictures. On one side, colouring touches the retouching of photographs, and on the other it borders on painting. The colouring of portraits of members of the higher classes of 19th century society idealizes the portrayed persons. The colouring of landscapes makes them more documentary, and painting over market and military portraits of the beginning of the 20th century changes them into pictures. The collector also finds the same idealization and revival of pictures by colouring in the works of recent photographers.

When Golosovsky speaks of the Russian photographic community and its extensive exhibition programme at the beginning of the century, he mentions the "photographic history makers" of the time with respect. "A history maker is more than a photographer, he collected and exhibited, discussed and studied" - this is an appreciation of those who created the environment of Russian photography a hundred years ago. Today, it also fully applies to Golosovsky himself. His collection is the product of his own historical research, study in archives and libraries, observation of actual photographic processes. To create the history of photography of his country and to connect this history with the worldwide artistic context, really requires a completely exact personal position and great courage.•

Nikolaj Petrov (1876-1940)
Female portrait
(Y. D. Voronets-Kontvod)
Kiev 1908
15,7 x 10,2 Rubber print

A portrait and landscape photographer, founder of the photographic society "Dagger" in Kiev. In the second decade of the 20th century he also worked in Moscow. One of the leading personalities of Russian history of photography. He led publication of the magazine "Fotograf" in the second decade of the century. He worked with complex photographic prints. The unusually enlarged face and the special characteristic of the model are emphasized with contrasting light and the velvety softlight of the black tones of the rubber print.