The exhibition “ON PHOTOGRAPHY. Chance / Singularity / Adventure” brings together more than 120 works from the ROSPHOTO collection. It addresses the nature and poetics of photography, inviting viewers to shift their attention from the subject of the image to the very process of perceiving the photograph.
By its very nature, photography is directly tied to the camera; it is, to quote the philosopher Vilém Flusser, a “technical image” — an artist may paint what they have never seen, but a photographer “can capture only what is photographable.”
The online exhibition shows how evolving possibilities, linked to camera design and the development of light-sensitive materials, influenced both what and how things were photographed.
Some masters of photography performed technical retouching to compensate for the limitations of early cameras and to eliminate visible defects in the image — such as spots or exposure errors. A wide range of techniques can be found: from drawing in a background or adding clouds to an overly bright sky, to subtle enhancements such as brightening the pupils or emphasizing the contours of the hair. Over time, photographic emulsion fades more quickly than ink, which can cause the pupils to appear unnaturally bright compared to the rest of the image — as happened with the photographs presented here.
“The Hidden Mother” is the term used to describe photographic portraits of children in which the mother (or another adult) is concealed behind drapery or another object in order to remain unseen in the frame. This phenomenon was especially popular in British photography and had largely disappeared by the early 20th century. It is believed that such images arose due to the technical limitations of early photographic processes: an adult needed to hold the child still during the long exposure time, since any movement could result in a blurred image.
Many early 20th-century cameras were equipped with a shutter release cable. When using low-sensitivity materials and requiring exposures of even several seconds, such a device was essential to keep the camera perfectly still.
Karl Ivanovich Kosse used an unusual, extended shutter release cable — it can occasionally be spotted in his photographs. This allowed him to photograph all members of his family together and avoid the presence of an outside observer.
Informal portraits of institute students are a rather rare phenomenon. The amateur photographs in this album were taken in the 1910s. The pages contain group and individual portraits of teachers and students, as well as views of interior spaces: classrooms, dormitories, and panoramas of the courtyard. The ease with which the young women pose suggests a sense of trust toward the photographer — likely someone from within their circle.
Georgy Lugovoy, who lived to the age of 101, was considered by the newspaper Izvestia to be the oldest photojournalist in the world.
During the Great Patriotic War, he worked for the divisional newspaper For the Motherland!.
The ROSPHOTO collection preserves not only his wartime photographs but also family pictures and images from an even earlier period.
In the 1930s, Lugovoy worked on creating copy negatives, presumably for a book about the Putilov Plant. Among his works are numerous rephotographed portraits of workers, as well as engravings and photographs. A selection of these materials is presented in the online exhibition.
The scientist Evgeny Krinov made a significant contribution to the study of meteorites, their morphological features, structure, and the conditions of their fall to Earth. Krinov led numerous expeditions devoted to investigating meteorite impact sites. A mineral — krinovite, a unique substance found in meteorites and not present in terrestrial rocks, was named in his honor.
Krinov’s photographic work accompanied scientific articles, books, and conference proceedings on meteoritics and became well known to a wide circle of researchers. The online exhibition features his images from 1937–1949 from the album Meteorite Fall Sites. The album includes landscape photographs and expedition reports.
In addition to scientific photography, Evgeny Krinov also engaged in artistic work. The ROSPHOTO collection contains nine albums of the scientist’s artistic photographs. Of particular interest is the album “Experiments in Color Photography,” which gathers his early experiments in color imagery made with a “Moskva-2” camera. Several photographs from this album can be seen in the online exhibition.
Artists and photographers consciously explore the specific ways photographic images are perceived and exist in the world in their projects.
Igor Savchenko is an artist from Belarus, born in 1962. In the late 1980s, he began working with archival photography. Fragments of a single photograph are transformed into a series, a sequence of images that often through the addition of captions form a new narrative, becoming a kind of universal image of the past. These techniques would later become the foundation of his personal artistic style. The online exhibition features an early series by the artist — “The Alphabet of Gestures.”
Lyudmila Fedorenkois a photographer born in 1961 in Krasnodar. She was a member of the Leningrad photo club “Zerkalo,” and since 1992 has been part of the collective “FotoPostscriptum.”
Fedorenko explores the medium of amateur photography within the historical context of personal memory. The exhibition features works from her series “The Time Before I Was Born,” in which the photographer experiments with archival images, multiple exposure, and visual effects created during printing.
The works presented in the online exhibition contain mistakes, “breakdowns,” and “glitches” that prompt viewers to look closely at the photographs and try to understand what is depicted.
In the process of such close examination, it becomes clear that the perception of an image depends on countless circumstances, and that photography in its very essence, as Roland Barthes said, is chance, singularity, adventure.
Last updated on 19.12.2025
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