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The thing of particular interest at present is the
early outdoor works. Despite the considerable technical
problems accompanying outdoor photography, photo-
graphers were often asked to join scientifi c expeditions
to do the job previously assigned to artists. They were
to record the results of research, photograph the nature,
the nationalities inhabiting the region, to work in the
combat area documenting the ongoing events.
Widely known are the photographs made by Roger
Fenton: he photographed the Russian fortifi cations be-
ing destroyed during the Crimean War of 1854–1855s.
The Russian photographers also made photographs of
the aftermath of the battles, scenes in the camps. C.
Kolpaktchi, for instance, made a panorama of destroyed
Sevastopol consisting of several photographs.
The work which attracts much attention is the one
by an unknown photographer who made a photography
of a church procession in Moscow Kremlin in 1858. In
this work there was something of a photo-report—a
recording of an interesting event.
The main task of outdoor photography was to record
the scene or object as closely to the reality as possible.
The photography was a assigned the auxiliary role of a
scientifi c document. In 1850–1860s Nikolai Vtorof, an
ethnographer, applied photography to create an ethno-
graphic map of Voronezsh region (he invited Michail
Tulinof (1823–?)to do this job for him). Vtorof presented
the results of this work at the meeting of Russian Geo-
graphic Society in 1857. In 1867 The Natural Science
Society of Moscow Emperor’s University organized an
all-Russia Ethnographical Exhibition. This exhibition
housed more than two thousand photographs of differ-
ent nationalities, scenes of their life and views of the
region. Photographers joined expeditions and missions
were recording of the events was needed.
In 1858 in the course of the diplomatic mission to
Khiva and Bukhara second lieutenant Anton Murenko
(1837–1875) made photographs that composed a unique
album “From Orenburg through Khiva and to Bukhara.”
Here were the scenes of life of the mission on trip, scenes
of life of local people and the surrounding landscapes.
For this work Murenko was awarded a silver medal of
Russian Geographic Society and afterwards he became
a professional photographer. Then Murenko got a task
from Russian Geographic Society to compose albums
of ethnography and views of different regions of Russia.
On opening a studio in Saratov in 1861 he was the fi rst to
start purposefully making photographs of Povolzshje.
In the second half of the 1860s a Russian photog-
rapher Michail Nastjukof made lots of photographs of
the Volga region and in 1866–1867s he issued an album
“Views of Volga from Tver and up to Kazan.”
More and more photographers started to make out-
door photos. An interesting ethnographic photo-work
was carried out by W. Carrick (1827–1878) in 1870s. In
the 1870s ethnographic photography was also practiced
by J. Raoult, a photographer from Odessa. He worked
in Simbirsk region, made photographs of inhabitants of
Moldova and Ukraine. A huge photographic collection
of valuable material on Central Asia was composed
under the supervision of A. Kun, a researcher, in 1874.
The album comprised four volumes and contained over
1200 photographs. For this album the author won one
of the highest awards at an International Geographic
Exhibition in Paris in 1875.
All these works were applied in science and their
value depended on the exactness of rendering of this or
that object or scene by means of photographing. The
emergence of association for mobile exhibitions (the
so called peredvizhniks trend in art) in 1870 conduced
to fi nding artistic value in documental photography as
these artists in the majority of their pictures recorded
some moments of real life as if fi xed down with a
photo-camera.
Thus photographs made in 1869 by Josef Migurski
a fellow member of French photography society, the
author of the fi rst textbook on photography in Russian
in 1859, made photographs of construction in Odessa,
which echo the paintings by Konstantin Savitski “Re-
pairs at the railway,” 1874.
Nevertheless it should be mentioned that artistic
photography is a term more applicable to studio pho-
tography (including studio photographic portraits). The
photographer arranged the setting in accordance with the
laws of painting, achieved the desired lighting through
a complex system of refl ectors, used a variety of studio
accessories, strived for the ways of making the image
softer at the expense of documental exactness, and at
times just copied famous paintings.
A widely acknowledged master of Russian pictorial
photography of the second half of the 19th century is
A. Karelin. His followers and students, like for example
Stepan Solovjov (?–1908) and others searched for the
expressive means in photography taking the aesthetics
of painting as a starting point.
The static character of studio photography had
to be overcome. The attempts to do it were made by
Konstantin Shapiro (1840–1900). In his photo-series
devoted to the novel by Gogol “Notes of a madman” he
recorded performance by Vasili Andreev-Burlak. Each
photography in the series corresponded to a defi nite mo-
ment in the context of the monologue. The album was
published in 1883, it consisted of 30 photographs and
today we perceive it as a set of expressive shots from a
silent fi lm with titers.
A considerable progress in the development of pho-
tography, the documentary photography in particular,
was prompted by the emergence of dry bro-gelatine
plates in late 1870s. The events of the Russian-Turkish
war of 1877–78s were recorded by such photographers