The Collection of Photogrpaphs

General Review

The museum fund of negatives and photographs numbers about 180 000 keeping items and includes the works made in the period from 1860 to 2000. The photographs provide brilliant and comprehensive insight into the traditional aspects of life of the peoples of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and modern Russia.     One can see on the photographs the people of different nationalities doing traditional kinds of works, rearing children, participating in festivities, performing ritual acts. The photographs depict their  towns, villages, kishlaks, auls, cities,  and cult  buildings: the Orthodox and Catholic temples, churches, chapels, the Old Believers prayer houses, Protestant kirks, synagogues, pagodas, datsans, shaman chums; their dwellings: izbas, chums, yurts, saklyas, fanzas; bazaars, fairs, small markets, shops with various goods put for sale, sellers and customers.

The images tell about casual and festive costumes of people, allow to see in detail the sets of objects included in them, to understand the manner of wearing clothes: the way of tying kerchief or tucking the poneva skirt, fastening apron or putting on complex headdress, and to feel how amazingly well the folk costumes were figured out and how beautiful were people in them. The most important is that the photographs permit to look at the faces of people gone years ago, to see their smiles and their hesitation before the photographic camera, to understand the world in which the ancestors lived and to know how it was gradually changed and how it has changed.

The First Creators of Collection

All this wealth already started to be accumulated in museum in the first years of its existence.  The first large photographic collections came from the artist S. M. Dudin worked by the commission of museum in the Central Asia in 1900-1902. They were followed by the photographs of the Central Asian peoples from P. N. Beketov, M. A. Krukovsky, E. E. Ukhtomsky. The life of Siberian peoples was reflected in the photographs of P.E. Ostrovskikh, F. Ya. Kon, D. A. Klements, A.A. Makarenko, A. V. Adrianov and I.V. Popov. In 1902—1905 the collection was replenished by the photographs made in Russian villages and Ukrainian towns by the museum curators E.A. Laytski and N. M. Mogylyansky, F.K. Volkov and the correspondents worked by the museum commission I.A. Zaretsky, V. A. Babenko and A.M. Vysotsky.

In 1903 and in the following years of the first decade the collections of the peoples of Caucasus  gathered by D.I. Ermakov, A.S. Piralov, N.S. Derzhavin, A.A. Mlokosevich and others entered the museum. Later the replenishment of the museum collection with photographs and negatives was carried out by different ways. In general the photographs made by the museum fellows and professional photographers specially hired for this work entered the museum. These pictures are original and sometime unrepeatable in their content.