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FotoFest
2002 Exhibits
Organized by FotoFest
Russian Pictorialism
 Russian
Pictorialism brings to the U.S. a period of creative
artistic Russian photography almost unknown outside
of Russia and still very little known in that country.
Although pictorialism was a worldwide phenomenon in
late 19th and early 20th century photography,
Russian pictorialist photography disappeared from view
in the 1930's. Soviet authorities declared the lush
views of Russian village life and studies of nudes to
be useless, bourgeois and pornographic, and by the mid
1930's, pictorialist photographs couldn't be published
in Soviet magazines. The last exhibit of Russian Pictorialism
was in 1935.
 A
Russian optical engineer and photographer, Mikhail Golosovsky,
is credited with saving it from oblivion. Having seen
Russian pictorialist masters in early photo magazines,
Golosovsky became interested in their aesthetic ideas,
their practice of art for art's sake, and their depiction
of life in the Russian countryside. In the 1970's, he
began to search for the work of those masters. Today,
Golosovsky's private collection is the centerpiece of
the revival of Russian Pictorialism.
His collection is the basis of the exhibition curated
for FotoFest by Evgeny Berezner, Director for Photographic
Projects & Collections for ROSIZO, State Center
for Museums and Exhibitions of the Ministry of Culture
of the Russian Federation, and his colleague Irina Tchmyreva,
curator and critic, and Chief Researcher for the Department
of Photographic Projects and Collections at ROSIZO.
The exhibit will present masterpieces from Golosovsky's
collection as well as vintage material loans from the
Kirov State Art Museum and the Sergei Andreyev collection.
The vintage works from the 1880's to 1930's will be
brought together for the first time at FotoFest 2002.
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