Images of St Petersburg

2-12-2008

The exhibition ‘Images of St Petersburg’ [7 June to 24 August 2008] , which includes over 100 photographs from the Hermitage collection, provides a unique opportunity to see life in St Petersburg in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the city was still the capital and lively centre of the Russian empire. Visitors to St Petersburg will discover that in spite of revolution and war the centre of the city and the Hermitage were very well preserved, as can be seen in the historic photographs offering pleasantly familiar views in this 9th exhibition in the Hermitage Amsterdam.

Levitski (?)
Nicholas I (after an original painting of F. Krüger), Around 1850
7 x 5 cm; 12,8 x 11 cm
State Hermitage Museum St Petersburg

Russia was one of the first countries in the middle of the 19th century to take up the new invention of photography. It soon had a rapidly growing number of practitioners, both professional and amateur. As the technique became ever simpler and more accessible, its potential began to be fully exploited and photographs came to be part of everyday life in many layers of society. By the late nineteenth century a family without at least one cherished family portrait would have been rare.

C. Bergamasco
Zinaida Joesoepova, Around 1892
12 x 10,3 cm
State Hermitage Museum St Petersburg

From 1860 to 1890 portrait photography was dominated by Sergey Levitsky and Carlo Bergamasco, who were also two of the first to be accorded the status of Court Photographer. They always used the very latest technological achievements, but their works tended to look rather uniform. The reason for this was that they always employed similar compositional devices and props, in accordance with the wishes of their clients, who usually wanted their portraits to be set either in a sumptuous interior or in a picturesque landscape. Levitsky and Bergamasco were so highly admired in St Petersburg in the 19th century that they exerted a huge influence on the city’s many other photographic studios. Often the only means of differentiating works by other masters is through the marks and logos on the mounts.

In 1883 Bergamasco took photos at the most splendid ball of the time in St Petersburg, where the guests were dressed in ‘historical’ costumes. In 1903, the year of the city’s 200th anniversary, this ball was repeated at the Winter Palace. At the personal request of the Empress, the city’s best photographers captured the guests wearing their costumes. One popular (and extremely expensive) studio by then was that of Elena Mrozovskaya (one of the very few female photographers). Some of the guests had their own photographs taken, such as Princess Orlova-Davydova, whose enlarged tinted portrait by Mrozovskaja is strikingly different from the others.

But not everyone concentrated on society portraits. Some photographers sought a wider use of photography, among them William Carrick. Not only did he produce large city views such as that of the Stroganov Palace, but in the 1860s and 1870s he was one of the first to photograph genre subjects – scenes from everyday life. A large portion of his numerous shots of lowlife figures, many of them posed in the studio, were published in a big series in the 1870s, under the title Petersburg Characters and Scenes. His pictures of clerks, merchants, soldiers, street traders and delivery men, street sweepers, coachmen and other city dwellers were clearly inspired by the increasingly fashionable Russian genre paintings.

V. Carrick
Stroganov Palace, Around 1880
26,7 x 36,7 cm; 40,6 x 51,7 cm
State Hermitage Museum St Petersburg

Cityscapes made their appearance in photography in St Petersburg right from the start, although the rare daguerreotype views were not entirely successful and it was not until the 1850s that cityscape photography really took off. Among the earliest views of St Petersburg were those of Ivan Alexandrovsky, who recorded the ceremonial unveiling of the monument to Nicholas I on St Isaac’s Square in 1859. In 1852 Giovanni (Ivan) Bianchi opened a studio where he not only created the portraits which were to bring him such fame, but also the city views which gradually came to dominate his work. Born in the Italian part of Switzerland, Bianchi had come to Moscow as a child and had studied art there before turning to photography.

From the 1860s and 1870s come a considerable number of city views by Albert Felisch. His static shots of bridges and churches are remarkable for the high quality of their technical execution. Karl Schulz from Derpt (now Tartu, Estonia) initially trained as a lithographer, but applied the methods he had learned in lithography to photography. His majestic panoramas of the city’s greatest squares – Palace Square, Senate Square, St Isaac’s Square – provide a unique record of the city’s appearance.