St. Petersburg.
History Across Two Centuries

03.06–26.07.2026

0+

through 26.07.2026

ROSPHOTO presents St. Petersburg: A History Across Two Centuries, an exhibition continuing the series of projects dedicated to the visual history of St. Petersburg–Leningrad. The exhibition traces the development of urban photography from Alfred Lorens’s earliest photographs of St. Petersburg in the 1860s and pre-revolutionary images produced in the studio of Karl Bulla to photographs from the 1980s and 1990s that capture the city’s emerging visual and cultural landscape.

Халдей Е.А. (1917 - 1997)

Без названия

печать 2000-х с авторского негатива 1954 года

РОСФОТО КП 408/343

Халдей Е.А. (1917 - 1997)

Белые ночи

1950-е гг

РОСФОТО КП 408/225

Егоровский В.Ф.

Большой Сампсониевский проспект

1960 год

РОСФОТО КП 385/114

The central protagonist of the exhibition is St. Petersburg itself — a city that, even after more than 300 years, has preserved the deliberate character of its original conception. Shaped by the passage of time, it nevertheless continues to transcend its influence.

For centuries, the image of the city on the Neva River has remained one of the principal subjects of Russian photography and has inspired the formation of numerous outstanding artistic communities. Among them, the classical Leningrad School of Photography occupies a special place. Rooted in a shared artistic tradition, it was distinguished by a remarkable diversity of styles and movements while bringing together many accomplished masters of the medium.

The richness of the Leningrad School’s artistic approaches is reflected in the exhibition, which highlights the key stages in the development of photography in St. Petersburg. The display features views of architectural landmarks associated with the city’s founding, expressive genre scenes, images documenting the heroic years of wartime, and reportage photographs capturing everyday life in Russia’s northern capital.

The exhibition features works by outstanding photographers from the ROSPHOTO collection, including Alfred Lorens, Karl and Victor Bulla, Boris Ignatovich, Boris Kudoyarov, Boris Smelov, Sergei Falin, Boris Mikhalevkin, Valery Degtyarev, Sergei Kompaniychenko, Alexander Kitaev, Sergei Sveshnikov, Alexey Titarenko, and many others.

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Alexander Kitaev

Cityscape

1995

kp084_080_Lв альбоме_7146_0001_Слой 3

Boris Smelov

Panorama of the Neva River and the Spit of Vasilyevsky Island

1970s–1990s

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Sergei Kompaniychenko

Blagoveshchensky Bridge

2019

St. Petersburg is a city celebrated in countless forms of art — a city-monument and a city of destiny. Since the very birth of photography, it has been in constant dialogue with the medium, revealing facets invisible to the unaided eye of the passerby, telling the story of great historical events, and preserving the rhythms of everyday urban life.

From its earliest days, photography has served as both witness and interpreter of the city, capturing its changing appearance while documenting the lives of its inhabitants and the unfolding of history.