and Belarus, only recently gained independence in
the last two decades, and have been attempting to
create opportunities for formal photographic art edu-
cation and support of those artists who explore either
specific or general existential themes through the me-
dium of photography. The second model occurred in
countries such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, which
became part of the Socialist Bloc after World War II.
In these countries, the Iron Curtain was not so rigid,
allowing artists to be aware of the recent photo-
graphic developments in the rest of the world. There-
fore, the history of photography in these countries
correlates more closely to the history of photographic
movements in the West.
In the early 1900s, Eastern European photogra-
phers learned about the ideas of Pictorialism from
their fellow artists in Western Europe. In 1895, the
Art Photography Club [Klub Milosnikow Sztuki
Fotograficznej], founded in 1891 in Lwow, began
to publish Przeglad Fotograficzny [Photography
Review], the first monthly dedicated to photogra-
phy in the Polish territories. By the early twentieth
century, photography in Eastern Europe played an
important part as both an artistic and a documen-
tary medium. In 1901, the Warsaw Photographic
Society was founded. In Russia, M.N. Dmitriev
(1858–1948) is considered the founder of the genre
of documentary photographic essay. He documen-
ted peasant famine in the area of Nizhnii Novgorod
at the end of the nineteenth century and created
photo portraits of the writer A.M. Gorky and the
opera singer F. I. Shalyapin. Russian N.A. Petrov
(1876–1940) is considered one of the main protago-
nists of Pictorialism in photography. For many
years, he was the president of the Society of Photo-
graphers Amateurs ‘‘Daguerre’’ in Kiev. In this
capacity, he also organized many international
exhibitions in Kiev, introducing Ukrainian photo-
graphers to innovations and developments in other
European countries. S.A. Lubovnikov (1870–1941)
was known for his depictions of peasants. For his
work, he received an award at the Paris World Fair
in 1900, and he was given the title of honorary
member of the Royal Photographic Society, Lon-
don in 1910.
Jan Bulhak (1876–1950), whose influence contin-
ued until after World War II, became, in 1908, the
first Polish photographer to turn to Pictorialism.
His books includeFotografica(Photography),Este-
tyka Swiatla(The Aesthetics of Light), andFoto-
grafia Ojczysta(Photography of the Homeland).A
portraitist, he also recorded important national
landmarks, combining his interest in art photogra-
phy with nationalist ideas. Bulhak first worked in
Wilno (1912–1919), and then in the 1920s and 1930s
throughout Poland. He also was a member of the
Polish Photo Club, founded in 1930, and a lecturer
on art photography department in the Department
of Fine Arts at Stefan Batory University in Wilno
between 1919 and 1939. Tadeusz Rzaca, a pioneer
in Polish color photography with pictorial aes-
thetics, was active in Krakow from approximate-
ly 1910.
Lwow, Poland was one of the main centres of the
pictorialist school. Pictorialists found their inspira-
tion in the works of masters active in Austria,
including Hans Watzek and Hugo Henneberg, and
had institutional support from Lwow Polytechnic
and the University of Lwow. The Lwow Photo-
graphic Society united such important figures as
Henryk Mikolasch, Jozef Switkowski, and chemist
Witold Romer, who in 1936 invented ‘‘isohelia,’’ a
technique that sharpens contrast and defines three-
dimensional images.
Constructivism in the 1920s was an innovative,
influential photographic movement. Originally con-
ceived by Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin and taken
up by brothers Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo,
it was preoccupied with abstract painting and sculp-
ture. It was Alexandr Rodchenko (1891–1956) who
combined the ideas of the abstract art of Su-
premetist painter Kazimir Malevich and Tatlin
with the idealism of the post-revolutionary Russia
and translated the movement into graphic design
and photography. The language of Constructivism,
with its unusual perspectives, geometric composi-
tions, and precise arrangements of the object coin-
cided well with the desires of the new regime to
create a new, reformed egalitarian society. While
Tatlin attempted to create a monument to these
new ideas in his sculpture,Monument to the Third
International, using non-traditional materials such
as glass and steel, Rodchenko claimed that contem-
porary men who believed in revolutionary ideas
should reject the old-fashioned medium of painting
because of its romantic, bourgeois connotations
and accept photography as a new medium of repre-
sentation. ‘‘Photograph and be photographed,’’ he
proclaimed in 1928 (Hughes 1991). Indeed, Rod-
chenko attempted to create pictures that presen-
ted objects from previously unknown and unseen
angles. He was notorious in choosing unusual per-
spectives and shortenings for his works so that
architectural elements such as stairs or balconies
resembled geometrical figures, and his photographs
were similar to abstractions (‘‘Stairs,’’ 1930).
Rodchenko was also interested in the medium of
photomontage, which he used for illustrations and
book covers. For example, he illustrated the Soviet
Revolution’s leading poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’sRUSSIA AND EASTERN EUROPE, PHOTOGRAPHY IN