Decorative photography in Russia

Strictly speaking, any photograph put in interior and affecting it somehow is a decorative photograph. Even amateur photos of beloved offsprings standing on the table in a quiet office of a senior executive for him to pour out his  parental affection having nothing to do with sniveling noses and always clammy hands are also decorative photographs.



These are not just a bit blurred and overexposed children's faces in frames but the dominant of the desktop letting guests lift a bit the veil hiding its owner's emotions. As for the owner himself, he will be able to feel a perfect father of a family. It means that such photographs perform the main function of interior - not to decorate but to fill with sense and give full-fledged comfort. Of course, if we put these photos in a drawer, they will lose their "decorative" function still being photographs - even if they are not very good ones.



However, there are photographs which are initially intended not for "stopping a moment" no matter what kind of moment it could be. They are not meant for mentioning the fact that the author of the photograph has at last bought a camera. They neither proclaim that the owner of the office is fond of his children nor dull guilt complex. They are intended for giving the office a new sense. Not for fixing but for changing.



Such photographs are to be put not in a family book but in an art photo album. They are not to be used for hiding stains on the wallpaper or memory gaps. We look at them with admiration and we are proud of them not because of WHAT is depicted on them but because of HOW it is depicted. These photographs are objects full of aesthetic meaning. Their existence itself affirms that photography is a form of art. Besides, they can be a part of decorative art by right.



Photography was acknowledged as an object of art by no means immediately after it came into being. Even if we consider photography to be invented by Daguerre and  Niépce in 1820s, the first attempts to make photography artistic took place after almost 80 years after the first daguerreotype was made.



The desire to make photography a liberal art could be seen since the mid-19th century (at least in the west - in England and France), but the real steps in this direction were made only at the turn of the 19h century.

Nicéphore Niépce,                                Louis Daguerre



camera obscura in the original design           camera obscura made by Nicéphore Niépce


It is natural. First photographers were experimenting on equipment and chemicals. They wanted to achieve a correct picture. Only after it had been done, people who had become proficient in

the craft of  production of images with the use of light and silver-coated plates began to improve the image itself. This process coincided with the searching for new ways in the art of painting.

It is not known whether it was a worldwide development of photography that urged artists to search for new forms and means of transferring the reality onto the canvas. Perhaps it is so because the world had got an instrument for exact transferring of a picture. It was such support for realism that was no use to compete with. There were people saying that photography means death for painting.



However, it all may have gone in a different way: search in the field of painting urged photography to the way of artistry. Perhaps it was time itself that urged both painting and photography. In all this guesswork there is only one fact which is reliable: both artists and photographers began to master new forms in one and the same period.



For an artist as a votary of an ancient and liberal art a new way of thinking could open many different aspects such as temporality and instability of forms, disunion of space and even retreat from former criteria of beauty and harmony. For a photography as a comparatively young form of art such kind of search was secondary.



What came first was the problem of a photographer's role in the picture delivered by precise and impartial camera. It was necessary to master the technique of introducing oneself and one's own view into a photograph.  Though there were fewer such methods in comparison with those used by artists, it was enough to be able to maintain photography in the world of art. Experiments with taking photos of moving objects, using of filters, mastering complicated technique of printing with overlay of negatives, cutting and making collages were brought into play.



Photographers who were called pictorialists in the west were the first ones to take up amazing experiments with photography in Russia. Their aim was rather clear from the way they named themselves. They were striving for bringing photography closer to a work of art. They used soft focus lenses, played with light and mastered special technique of printing which sometimes was extremely labor-consuming.



Pictorial photography was intended not to imitate rough reality of visible life but to emphasize an artist's individual view, the emotion he wanted to put into an image. These people were some kind of impressionists in photography.



The Russian pictorialists who are considered the most significant ones for the history of this art are Yuriy Eryomin, Alexander Grinberg, Nikolay Svishov-Paola and, of course, Nikolay Andreev. "Photographers came out from "Lagged behind" by Andreev as all the writers came out from "The Overcoat" by Gogol", such words were said about Nikolay Andreev.



"Late"
Nikolay Andreev.



The Boat
Nikolai Svishchov-Paola the 1920s
The collection of the Moscow Photography House museum


In the same period a brilliant portrait master Moysey Nappelbaum appears in the Russian photography.



Portrait of Anna Akhmatova
By Moysey Nappelbaum



His strong point was work with the models and experiments with light. He put forward and used an idea which had been absolutely revolutionary for the portrait photographers of those days: it was the idea of shooting with the use of only one but powerful light source put into a homemade floodlight reflector resembling a bucket. It contradicted the established practice. It had been considered that an artistic photograph could be made only with the use of 3 or more light sources. 


Prokudin-Gorsky, a photographer, worked with color. The inheritance he left is the collection of landscape photographs of the Russian empire.



Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1905 and  1915)





Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky


He applied 3 color filters one after another for every photograph and then projected all the three images on the screen. Besides, there was a simple but very popular method - coloring of photos with a brush and paints by hand (such a brightly-coloured photographic picture in a primitivistic style).



Of course, speaking of the dawn of the Russian art photography we should mention avant-garde photographers. The works by Alexander Rodchenko,  El Lisitsky, Boris Ignatovich became a trademark of Russian (Soviet) photography being the classics of the world art.


Pedestrians. 1928
Alexander Rodchenko


They did not imitate painting but followed the ways of great artists. As well as the innovators, the photographers of new formation were trying to segment the space, show the geometry of the world and heterogeneous nature of the universe.  Their creative work is the beginning of the absolutely new view of photography which was unimaginable both in the days of daguerreotypes and in the later period of using technological progress.


The 1930s were difficult times both for photography and for culture on the whole. There was great demand not in a genius's paradoxical ideas or emotional aestheticism of an adjusted picture but in the reports about achievements and absolute happiness of soviet people kept within the limits of socialist realism. However, the most important thing had already been achieved by that time: photography took its place among other forms of art by right. Prints became the result of the creative process.


It is the development of photography that let us speak about decorative photography as not an accidental element beautifying or disfiguring our homes but a desired and very often dominating element of interior.

Text by Tatyana Hein

Specially for Decorative and fine art photography shop Foto[O₂]

No part text or photographs may be used without the prior written permission of the foto[O₂] shop management or the reference to the  www.fotoo2.ru website.