History and culture: The exhibition “Early color in the Russian photograph. The Russian empire. 1890-1910” in Moscow

The exhibition "Early color in Russian photograph. The Russian empire. 1890-1910. New acquisitions" is held from July 1 to September 6, 2015 in the Multimedia Art Museum (Moscow). 

The exhibition continues the series of large-scale projects of the museum devoted to early color in photography and already shown in Moscow (Central Exhibition Hall "Manege", 2008), the Museum of Photography in Amsterdam (2013) and London's Photographers' Gallery (2014). This exhibition presents a collection of acquisitions to the Multimedia Art Museum - pictures, in the technique of "photochromic", one of the earliest techniques of producing a color image. At the same time the exhibition continues a long-term project "History of Russia in pictures", on which the museum has been working since 1997.

Photochromes deceptively resemble color photographs, but at high magnification, this deception is scattered: the pigment particles become visible and it becomes apparent that this is a photomechanical method of creating an image based on colors. The process of creating photo chromic was time consuming. The basis was taken in black and white negatives. Their authorship is almost never mentioned, so we can only guess what the pictures were taken, later turned into a photo chromic. As illustrating the process at the exhibition were presented rare preserved steam: black and white source and photo chromatic made based on it. This - "View of the towers of the Moscow Kremlin from the Vasilyevsky Spusk" Pyotr Petrovich Pavlov (1860 - about 1925), the famous Russian photographer, who kept the studio on Butcher Street, and in 1898 filmed the historical events and architectural views of Moscow.

The exhibition features more than a hundred photo chromes with views of different cities and regions of the Russian Empire in the late XIX-early XX century - St. Petersburg and its suburbs, Moscow, Warsaw, Revel, Kiev, Odessa, Helsingfors (now - Helsinki), Gurzuf, Tiflis and Crimea.