Journey to the East

The exhibition features photographs that continue the traditions of the Grand Tour of the 18th century, Napoleon’s expeditions to Egypt, and the journeys of Romantic artists to the East in the first half of the 19th century, reinterpreting these legacies in a new visual context.

The photographers aimed for both expressiveness and recognizability in the images they captured, featuring Egyptian temples, Turkish palaces, and landscapes of the Holy Land. Besides, photography opened up exotic vistas of China, Mongolia, Japan, the Philippine Islands, Singapore, and beyond to a wider audience.

Many of these countries were historically closely connected by the Great Silk Road, which linked China and the Mediterranean. The rich heritage of Silk Road cities fascinated travelers across the ages, and 19th-century explorers equipped with cameras were no exception. Today, their works serve not only as invaluable visual documents of the time, but as remarkable examples of high aesthetic quality. The theme of the Silk Road is primarily represented through materials from the most extensive segment of the route, historically closely associated with the Russian state, passing through Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Among the exhibition’s highlights are rare photographs taken in Mongolia by Nikolai Apollonovich Charushin; images by Dmitry Ivanovich Ermakov and Felix Bonfils from Turkey; Egyptian photographs from the studios of the Zangaki brothers and Antonio Beato; portraits by Anton Vasilyevich Sevryugin, court photographer to the Persian ruling dynasty in Iran; Central Asian campaign photographs by Grigory E. Krivtsov; and prints from Alexander Karlovich Engel’s Tashkent studio.

The works of Russian photographers who actively worked in Central Asia and the Caucasus from the 1870s allow visitors to trace the route of the Silk Road and the histories of the cities along it, while photographs from foreign 19th-century studios expand this visual journey to encompass the broader region commonly referred to as the East