1301
St Petersburg exhibition there were some participants
from abroad were invited by a commission of experts,
such as F. Nadara.
Maxim Petrovich Dmitriev presented some of his
works that later became a sensation of the Moscow exhi-
bition. These photographs were some of his Volga sights,
portraits, and genre scenes. In the 1890s international
photographic exhibitions were no longer something
extraordinary. At the Moscow International exhibition
of 1896, organized by RPS, the foreign participants
claimed all four contest nominations. Photographers
from Denmark, Germany, France and other countries
won gold and silver on equal terms with their Russian
colleagues. Russia came to be fully integrated into
the international photography process. The Session of
Russian photographers and other specialists in the fi eld
synchronized to this exhibition a study of the key issues
of Russian photography. The most salient question
was of copyright for photographic works and products
of photographic and mechanical processes. The law
was proposed to the State Duma in 1908. Before the
revolution of 1917, large photo-exhibitions took place
in Russia like the International Photo Salon of Photog-
raphy in Kiev in 1911, and a full-scale exhibition in St.
Petersburg in 1912.
The societies and the exhibitions fostered the process
of theoretical conceptualization of the artistic abilities
of photography. The articles on this theme started to
appear in Russia in the later half of the 1850s. The
photographers and art critics wrote about the artistic
potential of photography. However, these articles were
not numerous and did not infl uence the world’s photo-
graphic process.
During meetings of photographic societies, the ques-
tion or problem that photography infl uenced life, or that
life infl uenced photography was frequently discussed.
For example, M.Dmitriev’s album The Year of Poor
Crops of 1891–1892 in the Nijnij Novgorod Province
caused much infl uence on the public opinion and con-
tributed to the activation of the government’s aid to the
ones who suffered from drought, typhus and cholera.
It was this album that caused many photographers to
begin to emphasize social problems in their work more
often.
Many more heated debates on the specifi c features
of photography, its language, the aesthetics of the art
of photography, and the analysis of the achievements
of world photography. In the beginning of the 1900s, a
sharp debate arose in the photographic sphere regard-
ing pictorial photography. This debate grew into an
analysis of the nature of the artistic photographic im-
age in general. Even though the works of the Russian
photographers could not already infl uence the world’s
pictorial photography, it played an important role in the
development of the Russian photography.
After 1932, all the artistic societies ended to create
a space for the style of “soviet” realism.
Alexey Loginov
See also: Dmitriev, Maxim Petrovich.Further Reading
Awards of the exhibitioners at the photography exhibition and
practices, Fotografi cheski Vestnik, 1889, no. 6, 121–129.
Barchatova, E., “Photography: A Science? A Craft? An Art!”
Russian Photography, (1996) 5–22.
Boltyanski, G., Essays on History of Photography in the USSR,
Goskinoizdat, 1939, 225.
Loginov, A., Russian Pictorial Photography./ Pictorial Photogra-
phy in Russia. 1890s–1920s 10–29, M., Art-Rodnik, 2002.
“Moscow Photography exhibition,” Fotograf Lyubitel [Amateur
Photographer], no. 4 (1896): 150–153.
Podluzski, B., “The Activities of Russian Photographic Society.”
Sovetskoye foto [Soviet Photography] no. 1 (1927): 26–27.SOCIETIES, GROUPS, INSTITUTIONS,
AND EXHIBITIONS IN THE
NETHERLANDS
The fi rst encounters the Dutch had with photography
probably took place in Paris where they went in the
1840s for equipment, or in London where they visited
the International Exhibition of 1851. A few years later,
in 1855 the Dutch for the fi rst time had the opportunity
to attend an exhibition of international photography
in their country. It was the Exhibition of Photography
organized by the prestigious Vereeniging voor Volksvlijt
(Society for Industry), initiated by amateur photographer
Jan Adriaan van Eijk, which was held in the center of
Amsterdam in the building of the artists’ society Arti et
Amicitiae on the Damrak. It was quite similar to the ex-
hibitions held this same year and a year later in Paris and
Brussels, with more or less the same photographers and
comparable contributions. 65 contributors send more
than a seven hundred photographs to Amsterdam—pho-
tographers, societies and publishers alike—mainly from
France, but also from England, Germany and the Neth-
erlands itself. Photographs by the Dutch photographers
Eduard Isaac Asser and his friend the chemist Eugene
Bour were hung next to contributions by Charles Nègre,
Henri Le Secq, Charles Marville, Edouard Baldus and
the Comte the Montizon. The same exhibition was held
a second time, two months later in The Hague, inaugu-
rated by the king.
In 1858, 1860, 1862, and 1865 similar exhibitions,
the fi rst three also in the building of Arti and Amici-
tiae in Amsterdam followed: showing photographs
by Gustave Le Gray, Philip Delamotte and Nièpce de
St. Victor alike. The Dutch were a little more oriented
towards France than towards Britain. It must have been
the same mixture of art, experiment and industry as