The Béton Center for Visual Culture presents the exhibition "Pictorial Photography", which will show the unique author's works of pictorial photographers of the late XIX - early XX centuries. The exhibition will feature the work of 27 leading Russian authors of this direction in photography from the first works of A.Mazurin, A.Trapani, A.Grinberg to the artistic experiments of A.Rodchenko. The exhibition will include the author's prints, many of which will be presented to the general public for the first time.
Photography of the late nineteenth century, due to its relatively short existence compared to other visual technologies, lacked its own cultural memory, which means that it was necessary to develop the concept of photographic art from scratch. To fill this cultural vacuum, the simplest way was initially proposed for photographers to borrow aesthetic principles from traditional visual practices, primarily from painting and graphics. For this reason, a new direction in photography began to be called pictorial (i.e. pictorial) photography. At the same time, pictorial photographers in their work could focus on various directions in painting, depending on their own aesthetic preferences and the level of artistic awareness. In most cases, these were already established artistic trends. At the end of the XIX century. such artistic styles were impressionism and symbolism, so pictorialism developed under the influence of these trends in traditional art.
Pictorial photography has become a significant step forward in terms of the development of photographic theory and the evaluation of photography as a unique visual medium. At the same time, pictorialism was inextricably linked with the pictorial tradition, copying its aesthetic techniques, thereby being a step back in the application of the achievements of photographic technology, which as a result led to a crisis in this direction at the beginning of the XX century.
L. Shokin. The Moscow-Volga Channel
E. Piotrkovsky. From the series "The Art of Movement". Boxing. 1920s, bromoil
E. Piotrkovsky. A girl in a headscarf
E. Piotrkovsky. Alyonushka. 1910s, bromoil
V. Ulitin. Ships at low tide
A. Trapani. Landscape
A. Rodchenko. Portrait of the clown V. Lazarenko. The second half of the 1930s, gelatin-silver print
A. Mazurin. In winter in the forest
A. Grinberg. Pas. 1920s, gelatin-silver print
