Full Description
At the turn of the twentieth century, the photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a quest to document an empire that was undergoing rapid change due to industrialization and the building of railroads. Between 1903 and 1916 Prokudin-Gorsky, who developed a pioneering method of capturing color images on glass plates, scoured the Russian Empire with the patronage of Nicholas II. Intrepidly carrying his cumbersome and awkward camera from the western borderlands over the Volga River to Siberia and central Asia, he created a singular record of Imperial Russia.
In 1918 Prokudin-Gorsky escaped an increasingly chaotic, violent Russia and regained nearly 2,000 of his bulky glass negatives. His subsequent peripatetic existence before settling in Paris makes his collection's survival all the more miraculous. The U.S. Library of Congress acquired Prokudin-Gorsky's collection in 1948, and since then it has become a touchstone for understanding pre-revolutionary Russia. Now digitized and publicly available, his images are a sensation in Russia, where people visit websites dedicated to them.
William Craft Brumfield—photographer, scholar, and the leading authority on Russian architecture in the West—began working with Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs in 1985. He curated the first public exhibition of them in the United States and has annotated the entire collection. In Journeys through the Russian Empire, Brumfield—who has spent decades traversing Russia and photographing buildings and landscapes in their various stages of disintegration or restoration—juxtaposes Prokudin-Gorsky's images against those he took of the same buildings and areas. In examining the intersections between his own photography and that of Prokudin-Gorsky, Brumfield assesses the state of preservation of Russia's architectural heritage and calls into question the nostalgic assumptions of those who see Prokudin-Gorsky's images as the recovery of the lost past of an idyllic, pre-Soviet Russia.
This lavishly illustrated volume—which features some 400 stunning full-color images of ancient churches and mosques, railways and monasteries, towns and remote natural landscapes—is a testament to two brilliant photographers whose work prompts and illuminates, monument by monument, questions of conservation, restoration, and cultural identity and memory.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Author's Note ix
Introduction. An Unsentimental Journey 1
Part I. Documenting Cultural Legacies of an Empire
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: Photographer of an Empire 13
The Intertwining of Two Collections 27
The Prokudin-Gorsky Collection, The Library of Congress 13
The William Craft Brumfield Collection, National Gallery of Art 33
Part II. Journeys
1. The Ancient Heartland 39
2. The West: From Smolensk Southward to Ryazan 101
3. The Northwest: From Lake Ladoga to the Volga Basin 167
4. The Upper Volga: From Valdai Heights to Torzhok 225
5. The Volga from Uglich to Yurevets 277
6. From the Ural Mountains to Siberia 351
7. Central Asia—Turkestan 413
8. North to the Solovetsky Islands 473
Conclusion. Above the Abyss: A Reflection on Photographs as an Instrument of Memory 497
Index 507
