The State Mu­seum and Ex­hi­bi­tion Cen­ter ROSPHOTO and the Russ­ian Mu­seum of Ethnog­ra­phy pre­sent the ex­hi­bi­tion “Dmitry Yer­makov. Writ­ing with Light. Works by Ti­flis Pho­tog­ra­pher of the Late 19th and Early 19th Cen­turies.”

The his­tory of the de­vel­op­ment of pho­tog­ra­phy in the Russ­ian Em­pire in the mid-19th and early 20th cen­turies is im­pos­si­ble to imag­ine with­out the con­tri­bu­tion of Russ­ian pho­tog­ra­pher, trav­eler, and en­tre­pre­neur, Dmitry Ivanovich Yer­makov. His legacy is of ex­cep­tional im­por­tance for the his­tory and cul­ture of Rus­sia, Geor­gia, Azer­bai­jan, Ar­me­nia, Per­sia, and Turkey. Hav­ing worked in these coun­tries as part of ar­chae­o­log­i­cal, ethno­graphic, topo­graphic, and ge­o­graph­i­cal ex­pe­di­tions from the mid-1860s to the 1910s, Yer­makov cre­ated more than 40,000 glass neg­a­tives and more than 120 pho­to­graphic al­bums.

Dmitry Ivanovich Yer­makov was born in the Cau­ca­sus in 1846. In the early 1860s, hav­ing com­pleted a one-year course in mil­i­tary topog­ra­phy at the head­quar­ters of the Sep­a­rate Cau­casian Corps, he ac­quired topo­graphic sur­vey skills and mas­tered pub­lish­ing. In the late 1860s, Yer­makov, to­gether with the artist P. P. Kolchin, opened his first por­trait photo stu­dio in Ti­flis. His co­op­er­a­tion with Kolchin had an im­pact on the es­tab­lish­ment on Yer­makov’s rec­og­niz­able style, in which doc­u­men­tary au­then­tic­ity co­ex­isted with artis­tic ex­pres­sive­ness. At the same time, Yer­makov took up ethno­graphic pho­tog­ra­phy, while also en­gag­ing with the study of lan­guages ​​and cul­tures of the East. This theme be­came dom­i­nant in the pho­tog­ra­pher’s work.

From the be­gin­ning of the 1870s on, Yer­makov par­tic­i­pated in nu­mer­ous ex­pe­di­tions or­ga­nized by the Cau­casian De­part­ment of the Im­pe­r­ial Russ­ian Ge­o­graph­i­cal So­ci­ety, the Moscow Ar­chae­o­log­i­cal So­ci­ety, the head­quar­ters of the Cau­casian Mil­i­tary Dis­trict, and the Cau­casian Branch of the Im­pe­r­ial Moscow Ar­chae­o­log­i­cal So­ci­ety. These trips re­sulted in unique pho­to­graphic works de­pict­ing the types and cul­tures of many eth­nic groups in the Cau­ca­sus re­gion, Cen­tral Asia, and Per­sia.

After the death of D. I. Yer­makov in 1916, his ex­ten­sive legacy was for­got­ten for a long time. It is only now, thanks to joint mu­seum ex­hi­bi­tion pro­jects, that the au­di­ence can fully ap­pre­ci­ate the sig­nif­i­cance of Yer­makov’s her­itage and his ex­cel­lence as a pho­tog­ra­pher.

The ex­hi­bi­tion in­cludes more than a hun­dred au­then­tic pho­to­graphic prints by D. I. Er­makov from the col­lec­tions of the State Mu­seum and Ex­hi­bi­tion Cen­ter ROSPHOTO and the Russ­ian Mu­seum of Ethnog­ra­phy. A small part of the pho­tographs on dis­play was pub­lished in news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, and books on the his­tory and cul­ture of the coun­tries of the Cau­ca­sus re­gion, shown at in­ter­na­tional and Russ­ian ex­hi­bi­tions dur­ing the pho­tog­ra­pher’s life­time, while most of the works are pre­sented to the pub­lic for the first time.