The State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO and the Khabarovsk Regional Museum named after N.I. Grodekov, as part of the St. Petersburg Forum of United Cultures, present a joint research project dedicated to the first photographers of the Far East.
The State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO and the Khabarovsk Regional Museum named after N.I. Grodekov present a joint research project dedicated to the first photographers of the Far East as part of the St. Petersburg Forum of United Cultures. In cooperation with the Russian Ethnographic Museum, the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian National Library, an album and an exhibition consisting of outstanding monuments of early photography have been prepared.
The exhibition project and album "Amur Region in Photographs of the Late 19th – Early 20th Century" are dedicated to the study, preservation and presentation to a wide audience of objects of the ethnocultural heritage of the Amur Region – one of the most attractive regions of the Russian Far East.
The project is based on materials from unique photographic collections of the earliest images of the Amur Region from the collections of the Khabarovsk Regional Museum named after N. I. Grodekov, the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO, the Russian National Library, the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Ethnographic Museum, which are still little known to specialists and the general public.
The early photographs of the Far Eastern photographer Vladimir Vasilyevich Lanin, taken in the 1860s and stored in the Khabarovsk Regional Museum named after N. I. Grodekov, the Institute of the History of Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian National Library are of particular value in the project.
V. V. Lanin became interested in Far East exploration and photography while working with F. B. Schmidt's scientific expedition, and in 1862 he opened a photography studio in Khabarovka. From 1869 he took photographs on behalf of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society. Some of his photographs were included in the album "Amur, Eastern Siberia, Western Siberia and the Urals", containing more than 300 photographs and published in St. Petersburg in 1870. In 1875-1876, Lanin collected more than 150 prints in the "Album of the Amur and the Ussuri Region", placing them in 3 volumes. This work was acquired for the collection of the Imperial Public Library. The study and attribution of the photographs he collected continue to this day: disputes are ongoing, information about the authorship of the images is being clarified.
Lanin's works are equally artistic and educational, since they were conceived as exhibits and were reproduced as the basis for prints and artistic drawings in the magazines "World Illustration", "Picturesque Russia" and "Asian Russia". The albums collected by Lanin were bought by travelers, merchants, military men and many others who visited the Far East.
Lanin's creative path is echoed by the story of the Frenchman Emile Nino (1845-1923), who settled in the Far East in 1865. Emile Nino traded in furs, pelts and household items and, being a member of the Paris Geographical Society, traveled around the Amur region, took photographs and made travel notes. He was interested in the lives of local residents – the indigenous population and Russian settlers. Emile Nino published his observations and photographs in the Correspondance magazine starting in 1870. During his lifetime, Nino donated more than 200 photographs of the Far East to the museum being created in Khabarovsk, some of which are presented in our project.
The opportunities provided by photography – its fastness and accuracy – were used in all forms of scientific knowledge. A good example are the photographs from the expedition of Vladimir Konstantinovich Soldatov (1875-1941). Born in the Irkutsk province, Soldatov linked his scientific career with the Far East. He was a zoologist, ichthyologist, conducted research in the field of fishing and breeding valuable fish species, participated in many expeditions, and in 1907-1913 he headed his own, the purpose of which was to study and preserve local bioresources.
The collection of the State Museum and Exhibition Center ROSPHOTO contains a unique series of photographs, “Journey Along the Amur,” brought back from expeditions and provided with detailed and fascinating commentary by V.K. Soldatov. The ethnographic field photographs, taken in the 1890s, are among the earliest photographic documents for the Far East, which present the traditional everyday and ritual practices of the Goldi.
Previously, the authorship of these images was attributed to Soldatov himself. Thanks to similar materials stored in the collection of the Russian Ethnographic Museum, it was possible to clarify the attribution of the aforementioned collection and establish that its authors were professional photographer Emil Nino and his son Alexei, and Soldatov then provided detailed commentary on the back of each photograph.
Emil Nino traveled along the Amur on a small boat, he stopped in different villages located on the shore, successfully combining photography with commerce. His ethnographic photographs are unusually interesting and diverse: these are natural images of individual figures, and more often groups, in national costumes, with children, dogs, deer, tools, next to their homes.
Гольды перед юртой. Из серии «Путешествие по Амуру»
1907–1913
Photography provided many new opportunities for capturing and studying the surrounding world, which artists, entrepreneurs, and scientists hastened to take advantage of. These principles were fruitfully combined in the genres of ethnographic and species photography: landscapes that arouse curiosity and aesthetic pleasure – with topographic recording of the terrain. The project presents field photographic sketches and professional works of photographic art.
The second part of the photographs from the ROSPHOTO collection — "The collection of photographs of the Far Eastern expeditions of V.K. Soldatov 1909-1913" — was made later by Soldatov himself. This is a panoramic image of natural objects: bays, banks, river mouths, floods of the Amur, Ussuri, forest thickets and tundra, views of Nikolaevsk, the village of Novo-Pokrovsky.
Our project also pays attention to works specially made to disseminate knowledge about the Far East. First of all, these are illustrations from the albums of Lanin and Nino's predecessors, for example, lithographs from the "Album of Drawings for a Journey to Amur" by Richard Karlovich Maak, who studied the Amur region in the 1850s.
Non-photographic techniques, such as engraving and lithography, were often used to replicate photographs up until the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Of greatest interest in the project are the lithographic sheets made by the artist Nikolai Dmitrievich Dmitriev-Orenburgsky based on photographs by various researchers of the region, including the works of Vladimir Vasilyevich Lanin, for Leopold Ivanovich Shrenk's work "On the Foreigners of the Amur Region" (1903).
The scientific and economic development of the Far Eastern lands gave a strong impetus to the development of photography in the region. The Far East attracted the attention of scientists and businessmen, among whom were photographers whose names are not as well known as Lanin and Nino. They are only now being included in scientific circulation and will still become a reason for exhibitions and publications. The project is designed to demonstrate the diversity and interrelationship of the scientific and artistic use of photography, to recreate the image of the Far East and present it as contemporaries saw it in the second half of the 19th century. The uniqueness of the project lies in the scale of inter-museum cooperation in the study of rare monuments of early photography and the preparation of materials for the exhibition and scientific album “Amur Region in Photographs of the Late 19th – Early 20th Century”.
Heartfelt gratitude and respect for their participation in the work on the project to the scientific consultants: Elena Valentinovna Barkhatova, who worked as the head of the prints department of the Russian National Library from 1980 to 2020; Karina Yuryevna Solovyova, keeper of the photo fund of the Russian Museum of Art; Natalya Sergeevna Pozina, deputy director for research at the N. I. Grodekov KKM; Maria Vladimirovna Medvedeva, head of the Scientific Archive of the Institute of the Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Olga Vladimirovna Grigorieva, researcher at the Manuscript Department of the Scientific Archive of the Institute of the Material Culture of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
The organizers would like to express special gratitude to Olga Michi, Alexey Loginov and the Béton Visual Culture Center for supporting the project and helping to implement it, as well as to Alexey and Ekaterina Dunaev, who kindly provided unique materials from their personal archives: lithographs, maps, magazines and 19th century books.
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