Mary Ellen Mark's 1976 Photographs Of Patients In A Locked Psychiatric Facility for Women

 

A new book by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs compiles photographs and interviews from 1976 with patients at Oregon State Hospital’s Ward 81. Here, Jacobs talks about the project’s illuminating legacy.

In the spring of 1976, photographer Mary Ellen Mark and her friend Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and mental health professional, embarked on a trip to a women’s mental institution: Oregon State Hospital’s Ward 81. There they stayed for the duration of a month, photographing and interviewing the women confined within its walls. Often pushed to the margins of society and dismissed as dangerous, the patients of Ward 81 responded with delight to the interest from these visitors. Under the squalid living conditions and barbaric mental health treatments at the state hospital, these women were unaccustomed to the kindness and respect Mark and Jacobs approached them with throughout their project.

Mark’s photos, which have been compiled in a new book, Ward 81: Voices, flit between capturing deeply tender and jarringly raw moments, showing a vulnerability in her subjects that humanise them. Patients are caught with a sometimes surprising levity: striking a silly pose under harsh fluorescent lighting, doing yoga on the sanitarium’s sterile linoleum floors, watching Elvis Presley, starry-eyed, on a television screen. Portrait-style shots depict some of the Ward 81 women standing proudly in their stark surroundings: by a bath, next to a bed strewn with a few belongings, wrists strapped in the middle of an empty room. While Mark’s images reveal relatable qualities in her subjects (a sense of romance, for instance, as two women hug in a corner) some photographs reveal the undoubtedly disturbing truths of mental institutions, capturing electroshock therapy treatments and the cold loneliness of isolated living.

The book depicts a nuanced perspective on mental health in a moving exchange between Jacobs and a Ward 81 patient named Beth. “Beth, how do you feel?” Jacobs asks. In response, she says, “If I didn’t keep hearing all these voices talking to me all the time, things would be a lot better.” When asked about what the voices say, Beth’s response is so earnest and candid, it’s almost jarring: “Oh, they tell me I should break up with Mona and all kinds of things, but I don’t listen to ‘em.”

Nearly 50 years after the project, Karen Folger Jacobs reflects on Ward 81: Voices:

“Mary Ellen and I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and went to the same high school. We were people who really wanted to see wider horizons. We wanted to get out of our small suburb, and we both wanted to get out in the world. She ended up in New York and I ended up in California. So we wanted to do a project together, and she said that while she was working on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, she had gotten to see the locked ward for women – Ward 81. I have a background in mental health and I’m licensed as a therapist in California, so we made plans to go there. My feeling was that this was going to be emotionally taxing for us. We were going to be with women who had been locked up, some for years, and we were not going to be able to do anything to release them.

 “We agreed that we would not interfere with the treatment of the people, we would not argue with the patients and we would not argue with any of the staff, despite any feelings we had about them. We would just be open to the patients, and get to know them and their culture. Mary Ellen and I had to be a team. We had to approach this together, and we never had any arguments or disagreements. There were times when we felt really angry about something that happened, or at some staff people, but we had each other.

“What we were trying to do was demonstrate life there. It was kind of an ethnography because we were trying to demonstrate a different culture, which she and I had already been doing in our work: going to other cultures and societies. It was very stressful, but one of the things I insisted on is that every night, Mary Ellen and I would talk about what happened. What we thought about it, what we did right or wrong, what she would do the next day. And during the day, I used my tape recorder to record the patients. They liked being able to talk, and having someone to listen. Often, they would just take the tape recorder and talk to it themselves.

“In the 70s, we had deinstitutionalisation, and most people were discharged from mental hospitals. This was Jimmy Carter’s thing, and I was on the presidential commission for mental health advising them about women. The Carter administration put these people out of the hospitals and the plan was to have community support and mental health, but the fact is, it didn’t get funded, so it didn’t happen. All these people get turned out in the street, and what happens? Nothing good. Where are they living? In a cardboard box, in a tent, on a corner, in a street in a big city. It’s terrible for these people, but they are products of our society. The book was written about people in 1976 and our world is very different now. Our world has, believe it or not, more stresses on people, particularly young people.

 “You and I may still have doubts and worries and problems, but these people mostly came from really disrupted families. Many of them were abused in various ways. What we need for mental health is not only focus on treating the people, but focus on what’s causing it. Why are these people so upset? How can we make living more generous, more bountiful, make people happier, enable people to have better lives?

“I insisted that we not see the patients’ records, what they allegedly had done, any psychiatrists’ evaluation. We didn’t want to see what anybody was accused of, because these people were all put in by a judge who had determined that they were a danger to themselves or others. I wanted us to treat these people as people and be friends with them. To be honest, I think they were thrilled to have someone who was interested in them. The staff were just obligated to do these tasks, give them medicine, serve meals, et cetera … Mary Ellen and I didn’t have tasks except to hang out with the patients all day.

“Every morning I would go out and run a few miles, just to de-stress. I would see all these flowers and stuff, it was spring. One time, coming back, I saw a Camellia bush. I started taking some for Mary Ellen, and then I thought, ‘oh no, I’m taking them for who really needs them.’ I brought the flowers upstairs and gave one to every patient. And one said, ‘this is the nicest thing that has ever happened to me in this hospital.’ Nobody did anything special for them. They didn’t have choices. They were deprived of a lot of things that we think of as normal.

“We felt really sad to be leaving them. They didn’t want us to – they kept telling us, ‘don’t go, we want you here.’ But we knew when we came that we were going to stay about a month. We didn’t feel that this treatment – being locked up, electroshock therapy – was very healthy for people. But our intent there was not to make an evaluation. Our intent was to be a pair of anthropologists. We were documenting a culture. We were seeing what was going on in a locked ward people couldn’t visit.

“I’m very glad that we were allowed to come and do this project. I feel incredibly privileged not to be in a hospital like this. I got this newfound gratitude for life from there and I still have it. I can choose things, I can go to the store and get clothes, get food I want, talk to people, have contact with anybody I want. It’s a gift. I have freedom in a way that these people didn’t have, and most people aren’t aware of other people without freedom. Mary Ellen and I appreciated the choices that we have, and the thing about when you’re in one of these institutions, you don’t have choices about stuff. We both said to each other that the Ward 81 project was perhaps the most important thing in our lives. And it still keeps impacting us. It’s been almost 50 years.”

Ward 81: Voices by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs is published by Steidl and is out now.

A Humanising But Harrowing Portrait of a 1970s Women’s Psych Ward. By Niki Colet.  AnOther,  May 25, 2023.

Throughout the span of her prolific, decades-long career, photographer Mary Ellen Mark made it her mission to document people on the margins of society — those whom she referred to as the “unfamous.” From homeless teens on the streets of Seattle to circus performers in India, she displayed unwavering compassion for every subject she met and inevitably kept in touch with most of them, a practice she maintained until her death in 2015.

Back in 1976, Mary Ellen undertook her biggest long-term project yet — photographing the women of Ward 81, an all-female psychiatric treatment facility inside Oregon State Hospital in Salem. She had her first encounter with the residents — many of whom were deemed ‘dangerous,’ — while on the set of the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975. After a back-and-forth with the institution, along with the patients and their families, she managed to gain access almost a year later. Together with her collaborator, licensed therapist Dr. Karen Folger Jacobs, she lived and worked in Ward 81 for almost five weeks, returning to an adjacent wing at night to sleep.

“I became interested in the patients and asked their permission to come back later for some pictures,” Mary Ellen recalled later in an interview. “I lived very intensively with the patients for [several] weeks. I slept in a small cell and I ate with them in the morning. Just like everywhere, during my presence, people behaved tough and outside themselves [at first]. At some point, they got used to me and forgot I was there at all.”

Two years later, Mary Ellen published her seminal book Ward 81, which was praised for its nuanced portrayal of female psychiatric patients in the United States. A new exhibition now on view at the Image Centre in Toronto, Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81, revisits this captivating body of work through a collection of 130 photographs, alongside audio recordings and other archival materials which have never been seen before. Created in collaboration with the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation and her husband Martin Bell, the exhibition accompanies a recent photo book from Steidl, Ward 81: Voices, which was released in January. Along with the show, the monograph expands upon Mary Ellen’s original book, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the project and some of her subjects’ distinct identities.

“We have quotes from the women on display, as well as some audio recordings and lots of other materials that contextualize Mary Ellen’s work and the time she spent in the ward,” says Gaëlle Morel, one of the show’s curators. “As a photographer, she really wanted to understand the quotidian lives of these women and what was happening to them. And in the process, of course, she also questioned the validity of the institution in a compelling way.”

Employing a social science method known as ‘participant observation,’ Mary Ellen and Karen enmeshed themselves in the daily goings-on of the residents, capturing anything from arts and crafts classes to the immeasurable horrors of electro-shock therapy. Even more groundbreaking than their sensitive approach was the pair’s dedication to consent and patient autonomy. Each of the residents chose whether or not they wanted to participate in the project, and some selected their own pseudonyms. This underlying sense of trust and familiarity reveals itself through Mary Ellen’s intimate shots of the women bathing, embracing, or staring longingly out the window, yearning for a world beyond the metal grates.

“One of my favorites is the photo of Beth and Mona together, because not only is it telling of the institution’s environment, but also their unique personalities,” Gaëlle says about a picture depicting a couple confined in the ward. Captured amidst a hydrotherapy session, one patient, Mona, stares defiantly at the camera, hands on her hips. She’s standing protectively in front of her wide-eyed partner Beth, whose body language is stiff and reserved. “You can immediately recognize the differences between the two of them and understand that these are people with their own individuality and character. That was very important to Mary Ellen.”

When they weren’t working in the ward, Mary Ellen and Karen left behind polaroid cameras and tape recorders for the women to put to use, granting them a right usually denied to those who’ve been involuntarily institutionalized: the freedom to shape their own self-image. “The idea was to give a voice to these women, to reverse the power dynamic, to give them a presence,” Gaëlle explains. “They had the opportunity to put on makeup or choose their own clothing, for example. It gave them agency in their representation.” Polaroids showing the patients smoking, laughing or simply posing with friends demonstrate the duality of life in a psychiatric facility, the emotional limbo of an experience that seemed to have no end in sight.

A similar sentiment underscores the curation at the Image Centre, featuring photographs grouped together by pseudonyms — Laurie, Carol S., Mary Grace, Suzie and so on – in order to let each of them stand out. Additional archival materials collected throughout the project range from recorded conversations between Mary Ellen and Karen, as well as conversations with the residents, to letters or drawings the women made, signed patient waivers, contact sheets, and press coverage. "They treat you like you're no good,” reads one wall quote from a patient named Tommie. “What they're saying is, you're in a mental hospital and therefore, you're stupid, you're an idiot, you're dumb [...], you're ugly, and you're no good, and you don't belong in this world..”

Ward 81 closed in November of 1977, when it was combined with another wing of the hospital to create a co-ed treatment facility. Still, the project came at a pivotal period for the discipline of documentary photography, as critics questioned the fine line between exploitation and empathy, especially regarding images of disenfranchised populations. “This was one of her first big projects, but the same themes were present throughout Mary Ellen’s whole career. She was constantly dealing with vulnerable people, especially women,” Gaëlle tells me. “How do you find the best approach to show the necessity of the situation, but also remain respectful? How can you do justice to the people or problems represented? It’s about recognizing them without othering them.”

Mary Ellen distinguished herself from a controversial history of aestheticizing patients in mental illness facilities by eschewing false notions of objectivity and infusing her photographs with tenderness and soul. She cared deeply about her subjects, not only during her weeks in the ward, but long after she left, carrying their stories with her wherever she went. Her unflinching images continue to have an impact nearly 50 years later, preserving the women’s humanity at a time when the state had attempted to strip it away.

“The women of Ward 81 are tattooed on our memories. We know that for the rest of our lives we will often dream about them. We will be surprised to wake up in a bed without straps or locks, and to be able to see out windows without wire barriers. And whenever anyone says ‘That’s bullshit,’ we will be reminded of the inmates and their emotional directness, their honesty, and their intolerance for phoniness,” Karen wrote in Ward 81. “We identify with the fragility and the strength of these women we came to love, these adopted sisters of ours. They are women we might have been or, women we might one day become.”

Photographing a women’s psychiatric ward in the 70s. By Christina Elia. i-D, March 16, 2023. 

Ward 81 — In 1976, Mary Ellen Mark was given unique access to Oregon State Hospital to photographlife on the high security Ward 81, creating a nuanced and compassionate portrayal of female mental health patients.

Ken Kesey’s groundbreaking novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was adapted for the silver screen in 1975, captivating audiences worldwide with its unflinching look at life inside the high security ward of a state mental hospital. That same year, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark was commissioned to do a story on the making of the film, which was shot on location at Oregon State Hospital. While there, she met the patients at Ward 81 – the state’s only locked psychiatric facility for women.

In February 1976, Mark spent 36 days living on Ward 81 with Karen Folger Jacobs, a writer and licensed therapist, to photograph and interview the women. Together they created Ward 81 – a compassionate chronicle and rare insight into the lives of women institutionalised for mental illness.

“I wanted to do an essay on the personalities of people who are locked away – to show a little bit of what they’re like, especially the women. I didn’t want to show them as exotically crazy,” Mark told Time in 1978, when the work from Ward 81 was first exhibited and published as a book.

The work has largely gone unseen — until now. With the forthcoming book from Steidl and ongoing exhibition at The Image Centre, the women of Ward 81 return to view, their stories and experiences preserved in photographs, audio recordings and archival materials weaved together throughout the exhibition.

Mark and Folger Jacobs took care to avoid sensationalism, treating the women they encountered as complex individuals. “The approach they designed embodies the concept of care ethics, which emphasises, above all, that we exist in relationship to one another and can help each other meet basic needs and avoid suffering,” says  co-curator Kaitlin Booher, Newhall Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Modern Art.

“After going through an extended process to get permission to photograph, they approached the women foremost by paying attention to them and getting to know them, and that translates into the work they produced,” Booher continues. “It’s clear from the audio tapes the women recorded, the cards and letters they wrote, and the level of intimacy revealed in the photographs that Folger Jacobs and Mark were not only accepted there – but they made an impact.”

After Ward 81 was published, Folger Jacobs joined President Jimmy Carter’s mental health task force, presented her findings, and argued that women did not receive the same levels of care and treatment afforded to men by the state.

Nearly half a century later, conversations about mental health have become more open, yet many stigmas persist, making the work Mark and Folger Jacobs did all the more resonant.

“The idea was to provide a different perspective on mental health, and in particular how it affects women,” says co-curator Gaëlle Morel, Exhibitions Coordinator at The Image Centre. “Being able to experience an exhibition where the photographer tried a different approach (closeness, empathy, time) can guide us towards a better understanding and acceptance.” 

 Inside Oregon's Only Locked Psychiatric Facility for Women. By Miss Rosen. Huck Magazine, March, 6, 2023. 

          

The Book published by Steidl

In 1976, American photographer Mary Ellen Mark spent thirty-six days living in the Oregon State Hospital with licensed therapist and writer Karen Folger Jacobs, Ph.D., to photograph the patients of Ward 81—a high security, locked psychiatric facility for women. Mark’s unique access led to a nuanced and compelling portrayal of female mental health patients. This exhibition brings together the resulting photographs, audio recordings and archival materials to offer an in-depth view of the artist’s experimental and groundbreaking approach to documentary-style photography.
 
Organized by The Image Centre, Toronto in collaboration with Falkland Road Inc./The Mary Ellen Mark Foundation, New York.

Join IMC Exhibitions Curator Gaëlle Morel and Guest Curator Kaitlin Booher for a virtual talk focused on Mary Ellen Mark's groundbreaking approach to documentary photography and her seminal project portraying the lives of female mental health patients in the Oregon State Hospital (1976). Presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Mary Ellen Mark: Ward 81," on view through April 1, 2023, at the IMC. This event took place on Wednesday, March 22, 2023, via Zoom.

The Image Centre, March 23, 2023. 

Show at The Image Centre

­­It's been five years since filmmaker Martin Bell lost his wife and professional partner, documentary photographer Mary Ellen Mark.

From the time she first picked up a Brownie Box camera at age 9 until she received a Masters in photojournalism at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School, Mark became increasingly smitten with the storytelling power of a well-framed photograph — her subjects of choice: people rarely depicted in the cultural zeitgeist. "Mary Ellen could see a story in the ordinary that you might just walk by and not even see," Bell says. "And she had the ability to reduce that story, as simple or complex as it was, to a single frame."

Bell is unsure whether it was a labor of love or act of madness (or perhaps a little of both), but immediately after Mark's death, he began the daunting task of sifting through all of her contact sheets and Kodachrome slides — more than two million images —representing her life's work. "Nobody in their right mind would take on this task," says Bell. The mission was to cull the frames down for a retrospective book that would be true to the photographic trail she blazed around the globe.

For the better part of four years, Bell, along with Meredith Lue and Julia Bezgin, who run Mary Ellen Mark's photo library and studio, distilled Mark's brilliant career down to 515 plates: photographs shot over more than a half-century, from 1963 to a month before her death in 2015. Mark's lenses captured recurring interests — the Indian circus, the Twins Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, growing up in America and often, faces of people on the margins of society we too often ignore. The essence of Mary Ellen Mark's work now fills three coffee table books, 850 pages total, weighing in at more than 16 pounds and boxed as The Book of Everything (Steidl).

When he opened the door to greet Mary Ellen Mark in 1992, Clayton Moore was wearing a mask and never took it off during a shoot for Mark's photo essay on old cowboys. Moore was, after all, the Lone Ranger, and stayed the Lone Ranger in personal appearances for 40 years after the hit television series ended in 1957.

 "I photographed him at his home. It was a modern house, but he still lived the part of the Lone Ranger. He insisted on wearing his famous mask for all the pictures. I had to do everything I could to make him feel at ease with my camera and me, because he was extremely paranoid. When I was finished photographing him, he insisted that I sign all kinds of papers. As I left, I told him how much I enjoyed meeting him and that I was a big fan. He said to me, 'if you're such a big fan ... what was the name of my horse?' I said, 'Trigger.' He looked at me in a very scornful way. I quickly realized that I had made a serious blunder. Trigger was Roy Rogers's horse; Silver was the Lone Ranger's horse. I'm sure he never forgave me."

During her career, Mark found herself on more than 100 movie sets — as a "special stills photographer," hired for publicity or advertising shots — Fellini's Satyricon, Gandhi, Apocalypse Now, among them. But it was on the set of Milos Forman's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, where her commercial and documentary work intersected.

While One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was being shot, the director of the hospital gave Mark a tour. She was so affected by the maximum security women's Ward 81 that she corresponded with Dr. Dean Brooks for nearly a year and finally got access. For 36 days she lived on Ward 81, shining a light on a corner of life few of us see — the institutionalized mentally ill.

Mark's lifelong passion was to give visibility to the invisible. It would be an assignment for Life Magazine in 1983 that became a lifelong project, personally and professionally. Life sent Mark to Seattle, which had been named "America's most livable city," to document runaway teenagers. The story got a lot of attention.

Author John Irving called Mark's photos of the runaways on Pike Street "the perfect characters for the perfect story because they were both perfect and important victims...pimps, prostitutes, and petty thieves, they were eating out of dumpsters, falling in love, getting tattooed, being treated for the variety of venereal diseases passed on to them by their customers."

As Senior Producer of Nightline at ABC, I took Mark back to Seattle as she checked in with the runaways, now in their 20's for a two-part Nightline special on the 10th anniversary of her Life story. It was a rare opportunity to see up-close Mark's special ability to relate to the subjects she shot. Martin Bell put it this way: "Her relationship with the people she photographed was amazing. It was like an instant connection."

Mark didn't simply parachute into her assignment and move on to the next one. Each one became part of her effort to build a tapestry of relationships. Case in point: Erin Blackwell — better known as "Tiny," who Mark first encountered and photographed as a 13-year-old, surviving any way she could on Seattle's streets —including selling herself to men who were interested.

Mark and Bell were so taken with Blackwell that they returned to Seattle months later and featured Tiny in Bell's Oscar-nominated film Streetwise.

Tiny would become part of Mark and Bell's extended family. She's now 51, still in touch with Bell, still struggling and still a survivor with ten children.

 On a balcony overlooking New York's Fifth Avenue, at the celebration of Mary Ellen Mark's life a few months after she died, I heard a familiar voice. When I looked up, Candice Bergen was engaged in a conversation next to me. Mark and Bergen were at the University of Pennsylvania together and remained friends throughout their lives.

More than a decade after their college days, Mark had a magazine assignment to photograph Bergen's father, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, but they didn't want the dummy, Charlie McCarthy, in the picture. As Mark told an interviewer, "I first started photographing him alone, and he was very self-conscious; he was uncomfortable. So Bergen's son, Kris, got Charlie, Bergen sat down in the chair and took him out of the suitcase."

"I think it's two frames — it just happened so fast. I thought it was amazing. It's just one of those things — you know exactly what it is. Photography's very weird because it has to be extremely subtle, and yet it has to be non-subtle at the same time."

I would see Mark a final time at a photo lecture she delivered at the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art in Washington in 2013 where she projected the sweep of her work before a filled auditorium. Mark didn't know it at the time, but her talk was a preview of The Book of Everything — the story of her professional life, a project she never planned, let alone saw completed.

Near the end of that lecture, Mark took questions. One was about her preference to shoot in black and white. She explained, "I see in black and white. The subjects I seem to pick work better in black and white." Mark may have seen in black and white, but given the complex stories she reduces to a frame, one could say she specialized in shades of gray.

Documentary photography had all but vanished from the pages of magazines by 2013 when someone asked Mark if there was a future in the world she had been immersed in for much of her career. "I haven't had a magazine call me for over a year," she lamented, because today's magazines are heavily Photoshopped and they want a certain style. I'm kind of a purist who loves reality. I'm not an illustrator. I'm not going to let a bunch of art directors have me stop photographing."

Then she stopped and punctuated her point for the Smithsonian audience, "I feel lucky in a way because I had the best of it. You have to fight for what you believe in if you want to do anything worthwhile."

Bell doesn't sugarcoat the toll it took on his wife. "It was a difficult reality for Mary Ellen to confront. She'd lived and worked essentially through the golden age of magazines where photography was often coming from the streets. It was hard for her to deal with this, but it didn't stop her from going out and working."

There are countless places the public doesn't see. Occasionally, a photographer allows a peek into the hidden. Such was Mark's Life Magazine assignment to photograph patients suffering from Hansen's disease, formerly known as leprosy.

 "Officials there tried to steer me to what they wanted me to see," she said. But when she walked past this woman's room she stopped and asked if she could take pictures. The woman agreed. Blinded by her disease, her face is like a death mask held delicately in the strong arms of her nurse.

In Mark's ongoing effort to document how children are often the canaries in the coal mine of society — providing clues to the future health of a neighborhood — she spent some time in a South Dallas community devastated by crack in 1998 for Texas Monthly. The magazine reported that the kids wouldn't stay away from the drug scene because it often provided the only jobs — even lookouts were paid $100 a day.

One of the last photographs Mary Ellen took, just a month before she died, was for CNN, documenting New Orleans ten years after the floods of Hurricane Katrina. Fittingly, The Book of Everything concludes with a photograph of Thomas Schulingkamp, 26, whose family evacuated to Michigan for eight years after the hurricane and only returned when a New Orleans' school that could accommodate Thomas' special needs reopened.

Thomas' mother, Miriam Schulingkamp, who's adjusting her son's bow tie in the photo, sums up Mary Ellen Mark:

"Mary Ellen, with her long braids and open presence, tuned into Thomas, dressed in the manner of a Southern gentleman in a seersucker suit. He points to jewelry and items of clothing to start conversations, which can startle people. Mary Ellen did not hesitate with her words or look to me for instruction. She spoke directly and easily with Thomas, as if they had known each other for years. His bow ties were laid out so she could pick the one she wanted. With great attention, she talked with Thomas about the possibilities and they jointly made a decision. I did have reservations about how Thomas would cope with a photo shoot, as he does not always respond to specific and multiple directions. I feared that Mary Ellen would be frustrated, but she waved away my concern."

Had she lived, Martin Bell is convinced Mary Ellen Mark would never have taken the time to create this book. And it's probably just as likely that had she lived, Mary Ellen Mark would not have stayed hunkered down at this socially distant, masked moment in our lives. Somehow, she would have found a way to break out of her bubble and do what she had always been driven to do — grab her Leica and capture the people and stories others had passed by, making meaningful connections with those on the fringe. As she told an interviewer in Oregon in 2010, taking photographs is "like playing an instrument. The more you play, the better you get."

After spending four years creating this photographic love letter to his late wife, Martin Bell gets the final word on the final page of The Book of Everything. Mary Ellen must be smiling as her husband and partner describes her as "fearless...steadfastly true to herself and to her work. Even when overwhelmed with doubts, she was a defiant warrior."

 

The Essence Of Mary Ellen Mark, The Invisible Made Visible. By Richard L. Harris. NPR, November 22, 2020.

Mary Ellen Mark Website

True Colours? A Lost World ? The Photography by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky

 

Archived amid Prokudin-Gorsky’s vast photographic survey of the Russian Empire, we find images shot through with starshatter cracks, blebbed with mildew, and blurred by motion. Within such moments of unmaking, Erica X Eisen uncovers the overlapping forces at play behind these pioneering efforts in colour photography.

“At 9 [PM]”, Tsar Nicholas II recorded in his diary on January 22, 1911, “Prokudin-Gorsky showed us his beautiful color photos of the Volga and the Urals in the Semi-circular Hall. Dmitri and I played billiards.” As well as telegraphing a certain princely boredom, the entry is testament to a striking early achievement in the history of photography: the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky, an academic and scientist from Murom whose research interests had come to focus on photochemistry. At a time when black-and-white was still the dominant photographic mode, Prokudin-Gorsky had perfected a technique of capturing scenes in full color, so that he could dazzle audiences in St. Petersburg with magic lantern shows that looked to be brimming with life: plates of ruby-red berries, lush greenhouses, scale-like church roofs radiant in the sun.

As the editor and publisher of the prominent photography magazine Fotograf-Lyubitel, Prokudin-Gorsky had used his position not only to report on advances in color photography but also to illustrate these discussions with select reproductions of his own images, establishing him as a leader in the field and garnering widespread public notice for his portraits of Tolstoy. The wave of fame these photos brought him culminated in a 1909 invitation to the Romanovs’ summer residence at Tsarskoe Selo, where he gave the imperial family a private demonstration of his work. On the strength of that original presentation, Nicholas granted the photographer virtual carte blanche to pursue his dream of documenting the empire via 10,000 images in full color, allowing him access to areas that would otherwise have been off-limits and even outfitting the expedition with a special train-car-turned-dark-room.

Drawing upon the work of James Clerk Maxwell, Adolf Miethe, and others, Prokudin-Gorsky honed a technique that mimicked how the human eye processes light by dividing it into three discrete channels. With the aid of special triple-wide glass plates, the photographer would capture each scene three times over — first through a blue filter, then a green one, and lastly a red one. The positive images, when projected using these same filters, could then be recombined and overlayed to produce a gem-bright composite. In its elaborate three-shot, three-filter requirements, the technique differed from other early color photographic technologies, notably the Lumière Brothers’ potato-starch-based Autochrome, which the professor considered “complex and capricious” and discarded in favor of his own methods.

The most well-known of Prokudin-Gorsky’s works possess both a vitality and the peculiar bittersweetness that comes from seeing a world lost to the past: boys studying at a school in Bukhara’s Jewish community, now largely dispersed through emigration; nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia whose traditional way of life would soon be radically altered by forced settlement and collectivization. But there is something equally arresting about those lesser-seen works among Prokudin-Gorsky’s œuvre, photographs that their maker might well have understood in some sense as “failures”: warped images, off images, images shot through with starshatter cracks where the plate was smashed, blebbed with mold and mildew, scratched with a fingernail, or caked in dust. Here our focus strays away from elegant landscapes and fantastical Orthodox church domes and toward the great effort involved in staging and producing the photographs themselves.

The phrase “true color” occurs a number of times across Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings. To him, this was his œuvre’s chief virtue, the quality that set it apart from both black-and-white photography and other forms of art. “These images are everlasting—they do not change”, he wrote in a letter attempting to convince Tolstoy to sit for him. “No painted reproduction can achieve such results.”5 Projected for audiences across Europe — the most common way Prokudin-Gorsky’s works were seen by the public during his lifetime — his photographs were met with wonder and rapturous praise: a record of one such display for a group of specialists reports “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of approbation among those present”.

Yet the photographer’s claims of “true color” elide the degree to which, by virtue of his particular technique, many aspects of the final images are ultimately open to choice, in the way that an adagio may sound crisp or contemplative depending on the orchestra interpreting it. The photographs printed during Prokudin-Gorsky’s lifetime, for instance, were rendered in considerably more muted tones than the bright hues in which they are typically shown today. The prints and digital images familiar to modern viewers are themselves the product of painstaking efforts by various parties in recent years to overlay the photographer’s triplicate filtered negatives to create a single unified scene. Done manually, proper matching of a single image can take hours, a process that has been sped up somewhat by the advent of new digital tools. But no matter the technology at one’s disposal, harmonizing the three color-filtered exposures is tricky, not least because both the subject and the camera may have shifted between the first and third shutter release. For those attempting to align the resultant staggered negatives, these disjunctures present a quandary: which is the “true” photo, the composition with which the other two negatives must be made to conform?

Of the several efforts that have been made to tackle this challenge, two prominent ones have come out of the Library of Congress. The institution has housed all known surviving negatives of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work since 1948, when the library purchased and removed the collection from the cramped Paris basement where it had been kept following the family’s departure from Russia. The hand of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, who produced a set of color composites for the LOC in 2004, is instantly recognizable by the thick bands of color that form a kind of ersatz frame around each image: smooth gradations fraying into discrete strands of red, blue, and green. Walt Frankhauser, who began work on the collection in the 1990s, chose to draw out more brightness and contrast in his renditions. When surveying several versions of the same shot, the certainty of Prokudin-Gorsky’s “true colors” soon becomes nebulous and difficult to pin down.

The photographer must have been acutely aware of the difficulties his technique posed when it came to overlaying three negatives to create a crisp scene. He generally avoided photographing anything that might move when working indoors, where low light levels required a single exposure to drag out for ten minutes or more. Instead, viewers are treated to a series of still and dead subjects: wooden saints, elaborately costumed mannequins, and taxidermied animals whose rictus snarls were guaranteed to hold from shot to shot.

 

 

The bright light of the outdoor sun shaved down exposure times considerably, and it was here that Prokudin-Gorsky attempted to capture scenes of life. But even if he worked at top speed, there was always the risk that a sudden stray movement would create what Agüera calls “ghosting”— a candy-colored blur where a solid form should be. A Turkmen camel shakes its head pinkly; the breeze splays a carpet across the visible light spectrum; a baby pops in and out of existence between takes. Certain subject matter presented further challenges to the professor’s method. Rivers proved difficult: at Five Brothers Rock, the swift-flowing Chusovaya runs red, while in a shot of Girvas Waterfall, the rapids are alive with flashes of strange rainbow light. Clouds and smoke are similarly transformed into sweet blurs as they move across the sky. While Prokudin-Gorsky may well have understood these difficulties as faults of his technique, they constitute a fundamental part of its charm: documentary fidelity tips into something imperfect, enchanted, and alive.

Then there are those photographs in Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection that were affected not by a chance occurrence while they were taken but by an accident in the century since. Over the intervening decades, negatives have shattered or become breeding grounds for fungi; scenes once clear have grown faded and patchy as their emulsion has broken down. The names bestowed upon these imperfections by conservators sometimes possess a startling poetic quality: “butterfly wing”, “fern life”, “frost on a windowpane”. Frankhauser, who produced digital renderings for roughly 1,400 of the LOC’s 1,902 negatives and generally favored greater intervention to sharpen his pictures, reached the conclusion that “unfortunately, some images simply could not be processed”. But Agüera’s digitization effort, which tackled the Prokudin-Gorsky collection in its entirety, gives us a sense of how even these extremely damaged pieces could look. In one photo, color defects turn a Danube landscape into Rothko-esque planes of pure color; in another, a wedge of unalloyed pink slices through an otherwise bucolic scene of peasants lunching in a hayfield. River views break out in pox, ferns emerge through the snow of mountains in Uzbekistan, and a blue fingerprint smudges the foreground of a shot across the Kem. It is precisely where the image is unmade — colors bleeding together, coming apart — that we get a sense of how it was created in the first place.

                                                                            

If Prokudin-Gorsky felt that the great strength of his photographs was their fidelity to nature, he was also quite clear about the effect he hoped they would work upon the viewer. Seeing the breadth and beauty of the country, he wrote in notes to a lecture for his fellow Russian émigrés in Paris in the 1930s, was “the only way to show and to prove to Russian youth, who have already forgotten or who have generally never seen their motherland, the full power, full significance, full greatness of Russia and in this way awaken that national awareness that is so necessary”. Even before the Russian Revolution, which precipitated the photographer’s departure for the West, a nationalistic and imperialistic bent is clear in his work. Prokudin-Gorsky’s surviving writings are dotted with assessments of Russian advancement in photographic technology that explicitly measure his home country against Europe, comparisons that evoke a long history of anxieties about Russia’s status vis-à-vis the West. In this context, significantly, imperial possessions were often used as barometers of Europeanness, a sentiment perhaps most infamously contested in a quotation from a newspaper column by none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky celebrating tsarist conquests in Turkestan: “This shame that Europe will consider us Asians has been hanging over us for almost two centuries now…. With our push toward Asia we will have a renewed upsurge of spirit and strength.”

 

 

In this respect, it’s significant that Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographic survey completely eschewed Russia’s principal cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg in favor of forays into the imperial periphery. The 1905 public demonstration mentioned above, which won the photographer “lengthy unceasing applause and shouts of approbation”, focused on views of Finland, Dagestan, and the Caucasus — conquered territories populated by peoples whose ethnic backgrounds, languages, and religions differed from those of many metropolitan viewers. Likewise, his celebration of railroad technology — a prominent staple of his albums and the mode of transit that made possible their very creation — obscures the fact that these and other imperial infrastructure projects were often built by forced laborers. Some of Prokudin-Gorsky’s most frequently reproduced photographs come from colonial Turkestan, where visions of broad, unpeopled landscapes and deteriorating Timurid mosques with no one there to maintain them — images whose lack of living subjects was likely at least in part dictated by the limitations of his three-color technique — suggest empty terrain ripe for the taking by Russian settlers. Among his less picturesque views of the region, we find a series of photographs of factories and machines used to process cotton — a boon for the imperial economy whose cultivation was a major driver of Russian settlement in colonial Central Asia.

If photographic archives like Prokudin-Gorsky’s are indices and tools of empire, what happens when the images they contain are broken? It’s tempting to read into the collection’s imperfections, as if a negative’s flaws might reveal the instability of the powers that created it, the lie beneath all claims of “true color”. Like the Central Asian nomads and migrants whose movements constantly frustrated Russian colonial authorities’ attempts to pin them down under the border regime, Prokudin-Gorsky’s framing of the world required a deathly stillness that never comported with reality. Should something move, should the wind blow too forcefully, or should anything happen to the delicate glass slide once the photograph was taken — then only ghosts would remain.

In Search of True Color :  Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky’s Flawed Images. By Erica X Eisen. The Public Domain Review, December 7, 2022

In​ the decade or so before the revolutions of 1917, the photographer Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky crisscrossed the Russian empire on its growing network of railways. He visited the medieval towns of Yaroslavl and Smolensk, went deep into Siberia and north to the Solovetsky islands, and travelled south to Bukhara and Samarkand, Central Asian cities colonised over the preceding century. He photographed churches and monasteries, factories and waterways, landscapes and natural wonders, famous people (Tolstoy, the emir of Bukhara), peasant girls and factory workers. He travelled in style, with his own carriage, half of which contained his bespoke darkroom. The Ministry of Transport did its best to accommodate the unusual traveller and his considerable baggage. He was, after all, a man of importance: Tsar Nicholas II had received him personally in 1909 and requested more of his striking colour images. But Prokudin-Gorsky also had a wider audience in mind. His goal was to reveal the diversity and richness of the empire to audiences in St Petersburg and Moscow. With that aim, he put together a series of colour postcards for sale and gave frequent slide demonstrations to the public.

In 1970, an American graduate student set off for what was then the Soviet Union, taking a camera he’d bought for the trip. William Craft Brumfield spent the next half-century travelling through the Soviet Union and its successor states, becoming a specialist in the region’s architectural history and a respected photographer in his own right. Along the way, he developed an interest in the work of Prokudin-Gorsky. He visited and photographed many of the same sites, and in Journeys through the Russian Empire he brings the two collections together. The juxtaposition of the newer photograph with the old, often taken from the same angle, captures the twilight, and in one case the aftermath, of two empires – the Romanov dynasty and the USSR.

Rather than attempt an overview of the entire Prokudin-Gorsky collection, Brumfield concentrates on religious buildings. His selection includes Prokudin-Gorsky’s portraits of individual churches and monasteries, and – in one chapter – mosques and madrasas. He also includes a striking urban panorama of the Siberian city of Perm, taken in 1909, with its cathedral, mosque, railway bridge, foundries billowing smoke, steamers and barges on the Kama river. This is a city undergoing rapid industrialisation, a dynamism caught in the smoke moving across the skyline.

For the most part, however, Prokudin-Gorsky’s pictures have a static quality. The process he used to produce colour photographs required a relatively long exposure, making it impossible to capture the bustle of a city scene. His pictures of religious buildings were shot at quiet times: in the market town of Borisoglebsky, for example, he photographed the Rostov monastery before the market stalls had been set up. Without people or movement, these pictures seem timeless. Although in other photographs Prokudin-Gorsky sought to capture some of the great transformations underway in the early 20th century – new railways and waterways – his depictions of churches and monasteries, often set against a rural backdrop, suggest an unchanging country. The vividness of the colour images, and the nostalgia of their composition, explains the interest Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs have attracted in recent decades, as Russians look for alternatives to the Soviet legacy.

What happened to this pre-Soviet heritage in the decades after 1917? Is this really a Russia that was ‘lost’? On first viewing, the two journeys presented in this collection suggest not. Brumfield was able to re-create set pieces that differed little from those of his predecessor: the same church still stands, sometimes crumbling or missing parts, sometimes restored, but always recognisable. Photographs of the town of Suzdal, taken almost a century apart, show few signs of change: green fields and low wooden houses still surround the Intercession Convent, with no evidence of a Soviet imprint. The new industrial centre of Yaroslavl was built to the west of the old city, so the religious buildings photographed by Brumfield are still bordered by the trees we see in Prokudin-Gorsky’s images. There are exceptions: Brumfield’s shots of Yekaterinburg show a city transformed, the Cathedral of Saint Catherine destroyed and the district court overshadowed by Soviet blocks and post-Soviet skyscrapers.

The impression that Russia emerged largely unscathed and unchanged from the Soviet years feels wrong, of course. The revolution was meant to bring a grand transformation of every aspect of contemporary life, one that could only be achieved by destroying the old. Religion – its practices, places and people – was certainly part of the ‘old’ world. The most famous church to be destroyed was the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Built to celebrate the retreat of Napoleon in 1812, it was dynamited in 1931. Stalin intended a great new Palace of the Soviets to replace it. A national competition was launched to find a design but the project was eventually shelved in favour of an enormous public swimming pool: a holy site made into a palace of leisure for the masses. Prokudin-Gorsky chose not to photograph either St Petersburg or Moscow, so the church doesn’t feature in this book, and as a result the pairs of images, all of provincial outposts, seem to tell a story of continuity rather than rupture. Yet once you get past the often striking similarities between the two sets, a more complex story emerges. In the Soviet era, religious buildings faced many possible fates. There were certainly episodes of violent destruction, but also of neglect, reappropriation and restoration, and these phases overlapped and intertwined, reflecting an attitude to religion and its heritage that was above all inconsistent.

The anti-religious struggle began during the Revolution and the Civil War, when the Bolsheviks targeted the wealth and infrastructure of organised religion, especially the Russian Orthodox Church. The year 1929 is often referred to as the ‘great breakthrough’ because of its breathtaking targets for industrial output and collectivisation, but it also saw the intensification of the state’s anti-religious measures. In the Russian republic, a quarter of Orthodox churches were closed in just two years. The onion domes of the Cathedral of the Deposition in Suzdal, which Prokudin-Gorsky photographed in 1912, were destroyed in 1929 when the building was converted into a power station, supplying electricity to a nearby prison. The baroque Cathedral of Saint Catherine in Yekaterinburg was demolished in 1930. Such iconoclastic acts were typical of those years. Sometimes churches were dismantled more stealthily. At Borodino – where Napoleon was pushed back in 1812 – much of the village was burned to the ground when the German army retreated in 1942. The church’s bell tower survived, but was taken apart piece by piece by the chairman of a local collective farm, who was desperate for bricks to use in postwar reconstruction. The ruin of churches could also be a form of collateral damage. In 1961, the village of Krokhino was flooded when a new reservoir was created. Left standing precariously on the water’s edge, the Church of the Nativity of Christ gradually collapsed. The most common fate was for places of worship to be stripped of their valuables and put to other uses. Monasteries and churches became prisons, old people’s homes and warehouses. The mosque in Perm was used to house the local Communist Party archive. In the town of Vytegra, the cathedral lost its bell tower and cupolas, gained larger windows and became the local club, where meetings, social events and film screenings were held. Interestingly, as the historian Catriona Kelly has noted, church buildings in the USSR were never appropriated for housing, though this has been happening in Western Europe since the 1960s. What Kelly called a ‘sense of the sacral’ seems to have remained.

 Conflicting impulses were at work. Buildings were required to house prisoners, or grain; bricks were needed for new structures; gold was taken from cupolas to boost the state coffers. There were political aims too. Destroying or disfiguring sites of worship demonstrated not only their obsolescence, but also the power of communism to bring about transformation. Once the violence ended, the preferred narrative of the Soviet authorities – that of overturning the Church’s tyranny – risked being forgotten. At the height of Stalin’s cultural revolution, the destruction of churches, including Christ the Saviour, was captured on film in a bid to preserve the moment.

An alternative to destruction – which was costly and time-consuming – was to preserve religious buildings but change their meaning, flip them from places of worship into sites of atheist learning. Museums of atheism were opened in former churches and mosques from the 1920s onwards, but especially in the Khrushchev era, which saw the launch of new offensives against religious activity. Displays showed visitors scenes of the misery inflicted throughout history in the name of religion. At the Kazan Cathedral in St Petersburg, Roman Catholicism was represented by a diorama depicting a medieval torture chamber with a prisoner on a rack. Religion became a closed chapter in human history, a horror to be gawped at, a barbarism unimaginable in the present day. In this manner, the heuristic function of the building’s desacralisation was re-enacted each time a school group or coach of tourists visited. But attitudes to religion continued to shift, and by the 1980s, many displays were being reworked to give a rosier view of Russia’s religious past.

In fact, as Journeys through the Russian Empire quietly illustrates, the desire to preserve religious buildings as part of a national past was not solely a phenomenon of perestroika. Preservationists were active throughout the Soviet period, and even if their efforts were sometimes overwhelmed by waves of violent anti-religious activity, the idea that religious buildings had an intrinsic cultural and aesthetic value never entirely went away. Local efforts to preserve these buildings were often successful. The chairman of the collective farm at Borodino was eventually forced to stop pilfering bricks from the church by historians and preservationists. In the 1960s, the film director and actor Sergei Bondarchuk was instrumental in campaigning for the restoration of the church’s exterior, including its bell tower, which featured in his movie version of War and Peace. Several of the religious buildings photographed by Brumfield were restored while Khrushchev and Brezhnev were in power: in the 1950s, the Nativity Cathedral in Suzdal; in the 1960s, the Church of St Peter and St Paul in Smolensk and the Transfiguration Monastery on Solovetsky Island, as well as other buildings in Suzdal after the town was made a national cultural landmark in 1967; in the 1970s, the Archangel Cathedral in Ryazan; and so on. The desire to preserve a national past was felt beyond Russia, too. In Central Asia committees were formed in the 1920s to preserve historic buildings, including madrasas, and although preservation work faltered in the 1930s, new initiatives were launched in the 1950s, with work beginning in earnest in the early 1960s. The Miri Arab Madrasa in Bukhara and the Gur Emir in Samarkand (the burial place of Tamerlane) – shown in the penultimate chapter of Journeys through the Russian Empire – both underwent extensive restoration during the Soviet era.

 This is all quite different from the story of Christ the Saviour in Moscow, which seems to follow the arc of communism’s rise and fall. When Soviet power ended, the cathedral was rapidly rebuilt, once more serving the religious needs of the capital’s political and cultural elite. As such it also became a site for protest – Pussy Riot staged a guerrilla performance of their ‘Punk Prayer’ here in 2012. Yet the fate of the religious buildings surveyed in Journeys through the Russian Empire shows that the pattern of church destruction in the Stalin era and recovery after the fall of communism was not universal. The question of what to do with religious buildings was unresolved throughout the Soviet era. Blowing them up was appealing to the Bolsheviks, but so was protecting them as symbols of national heritage and pride; or preserving them while transforming their use and meaning, turning them into props for the story of communism’s secular triumph – a fragile narrative that had to be constantly retold. Contemporary Russia may like to see itself as the saviour of a religious tradition all but obliterated by the communists, but this too is a fragile narrative. The traces that survive suggest a less straightforward history.

Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky by William Craft Brumfield. Duke, 518 pp., £43, May 2020, 978 1 4780 0602 2

How to Flip a Church.  By Miriam Dobson. London Review of Books, February 18, 2021

Photography, since its inception, has provided an invaluable window into Russia’s turbulent past. The revolutions of 1917 irrevocably altered the course of Russia’s history with seismic political change, but also rendered an entire way of life not only obsolete but also taboo. Historians were left to pore over sepia-toned photos to piece together the vanished and vanquished world of imperial Russia.

How fortunate we are, therefore, that much of the pioneering color photography of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (1863-1944), who documented the Russian Empire in its waning decades, has survived for posterity. In his latest authoritative book, “Journeys Through the Russian Empire,” (Duke University Press, 2020) Russian scholar, photographer, and chronicler of Russian architecture William Craft Brumfield frames the life and work of Prokudin-Gorsky. He also puts his own magisterial career into sharp perspective with his own late 20th and early 21st-century photographs taken of some of the same subjects. The result is an extraordinary study of two photographers and, indeed, two Russias.

Prokudin-Gorsky was a creature of his expansive and creative era. This polymath, inventor, explorer, entrepreneur, and photographer was a scion of Russia’s provincial nobility. He received an excellent education in St. Petersburg that focused on both science and the arts, perfectly positioning him to pursue his passion for the emerging technology of photography. Prokudin-Gorsky felt strongly that photography demanded a full understanding of the science behind the technology, but he also understood its inevitable march towards main-stream use by amateurs; his ability to make peace with these competing notions was one of his greatest strengths, and a strong entrepreneurial streak enabled him to harness the economic potential of the emerging phenomenon in a ground-breaking career.

 Prokudin-Gorsky studied in St. Petersburg, graduating in 1889 from the faculty of Natural Sciences, after which he traveled to both Berlin and Paris to work with leading chemists and photographers. From the beginning of his professional life, he pursued his goal to produce color photography, but throughout his career, he was a vocal champion for his colleagues, assuming the editorship of Russia’s “Amateur Photography” and campaigning successfully for photographers to assert ownership of their work.

The scope of Prokudin-Gorsky’s ambitions matched the size of the Russian empire he sought to capture and preserve with his new color technology: a daunting one fifth of the world’s land mass with a Byzantine imperial bureaucracy that hindered access to many of the empire’s more picturesque corners and subjects. Fortunately for Prokudin-Gorsky, in 1909 his work came to the attention of the imperial family — passionate shutterbugs themselves — and after successful presentations of his color slides to the tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Michael and his mother, Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, Prokudin-Gorsky secured an invitation to present them to Nicholas II and his family.

Contemporary sources characterize Nicholas II as a great waffler, but in the matter of Prokudin-Gorsky’s request for imperial patronage of an ambitious plan to photograph the Russian empire, the sovereign acted swiftly and remained steadfast. Nicholas II ordered the minister of ways and communications to furnish Prokudin-Gorsky with a specially designed Pullman railway car for his laboratory and access to river transport. The tsar also gave Prokudin-Gorsky an enviable laissez-passer for the entire empire, and an order that enabled the photographer to solicit aid from all government officials. For the next six years, Prokudin-Gorsky traveled throughout the empire on several regional expeditions, using his color method to document the ministry’s development projects, particularly the rapidly expanding railroad network that was fast-forwarding Russia into a powerful industrial nation. But along the way, he also captured the natural beauty of Russia’s wilder corners: the majestic Caucasus, the arid desert of Central Asia, and the dense forests of the Urals.

Prokudin-Gorsky’s innovative color technology involved photographing a subject with three separate plates. By necessity, his subjects had to be stationary or at least be willing and able to stand very still. But the resulting images are anything but static; Prokudin-Gorsky’s show masterful framing and use of perspective in photographs that pulse with life and color.

It is unlikely that Prokudin-Gorsky understood that he was documenting a world that would soon disappear. But disappear it did. In 1918, Prokudin-Gorsky fled Russia, taking with him thousands of color slides, which he had tried to get the Stolypin government to purchase in 1910, but they had, as Brumfield notes, “with myopic parsimoniousness... let the matter die.” After Prokudin-Gorsky’s death in 1944, the Library of Congress acquired the collection of his negatives.

Fast forward half a century, and another photographer and chronicler of Russia’s rich architectural traditions began to document many of the same locations that first drew Prokudin-Gorsky. William Craft Brumfield is the foremost Western expert on Russian architecture and taught at some of the world’s most renowned centers of Slavic studies, including Harvard, Tulane, and the Pushkin Institute. In 2019, in recognition of Brumfield’s contribution to Russian culture, President Putin awarded him with Russia’s highest honor for a foreigner, the Order of Friendship.

 Brumfield is an academic who thrives in the field — his outstanding photography of Russia’s architecture is an invaluable resource to students of Russian art and architecture, as well as the country’s history. He was a natural choice to curate a public exhibition of Prokudin-Gorsky’s collection for the Library of Congress in 1986 and his association with the library and the collection has continued to this day, with “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” as a magnificent culmination of this fruitful collaboration.

“Journeys Through the Russian Empire” presents a selection of photographs from eight of Prokudin-Gorsky’s expeditions throughout the Russian Empire, from 1909 to 1916. Brumfield has cleverly arranged these, not chronologically but in a logarithmic spiral like that of a nautilus shell, beginning with the oldest Russian principalities such as Suzdal in the center and expanding ever outwards to the Volga river lands, the Ural Mountains, Siberia, and Central Asia. The spiral culminates in a trip to the remote Solovetsky Islands, which in Prokudin-Gorsky’s day housed a monastery and in Brumfield’s — a decommissioned Gulag camp. Each chapter showcases selections of Prokudin-Gorsky’s work and Brumfield’s own photograph of the same subject, often from the same vantage. Occasionally, the shots are so uncannily similar that one has to refer to the notes to ascertain which image predates the other.

But in other evocative pairings we cannot help but note the effects not only of time but also politics and economics.  Brumfield shows us churches that have repurposed or simply allowed to decay, but he also shows us more recent attempts to restore and revitalize. While Prokudin-Gorsky’s photos were taken over only seven years, Brumfield’s span almost three decades, and in this progression we see the changes in Russia from the Soviet era through perestroika to the present.

Anyone who has traveled throughout Russia’s vast regions recalls the staggering beauty of nature and the magnificence of the architecture, particularly in the more remote corners of the country. Both Prokudin-Gorsky and Brumfield capture this richness with images that are so immediate and evocative that one almost feels the heat of the sun radiating off the stone walls of Registan Square in Samarkand or catches sound of the Volga River lapping against the shore of tiny jewel-like Uglich or detects the musty odor of a long-neglected church.  “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” deliberately eschews photos of either Moscow or St. Petersburg, allowing the quiet majesty of Russia’s often overlooked provinces to take center stage. This is an excellent decision by Brumfield, reflecting and honoring Prokudin-Gorsky’s desire to capture the breadth of Russia for the empire’s citizens.

 “Journeys Through the Russian Empire” is a masterful achievement that readers will want to savor and return to again and again. In its pages are insightful lessons on everything from color photography to the nature of time. William Craft Brumfield has brought all of his considerable talent, expertise, and energy to produce an invaluable resource for students of Russian history, photography buffs, nature lovers, architecture aficionados, and anyone who longs to explore the expansive Russian empire through the eyes of two eminently talented and devoted photographers.

Excerpt from "Journeys Through the Russian Empire"

Above the Abyss: A Reflection on Photography as an Instrument of Memory

Time and memory are two of the broadest categories in human thought, fundamentals of philosophy, and of thought about thought. Interpretations of Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographic project—now universally available through the digitization of his collection at the Library of Congress—have often focused on their technical brilliance and the nostalgic appeal of a lost world vividly rediscovered in brilliant color. These photographs transport us back in time and create an illusion of memory. The images seem so tactile and so close. Such interpretations and glosses on Prokudin-Gorsky’s work tell us much, but what do they neglect?

In Prokudin-Gorsky’s idealistic project, photography, like the railroads that he rode and documented, served as a means of uniting a vast, culturally diverse empire through a vision that would enlighten those who saw the images. To behold the regions of the empire in bright colors would be to comprehend not only its diversity but also the role the empire played in uniting the peoples of an immeasurable Eurasian territory. In addition to documenting the medley of diverse cultures, he also recorded evidence of the empire’s development. Commissioned to photograph the expansion of Russia’s transportation network—seen as the engine of economic growth and progress—Prokudin-Gorsky paradoxically used that network as a means of recovering Russia’s past. Yet his vibrant images portray an order that would collapse in almost unimaginable violence within a decade or less of the photographing. It would be unreasonable to fault Prokudin-Gorsky for lack of foresight, although as a resident of Saint Petersburg he was aware of the possibility of terror attacks: One of them killed a potential patron, prime minster Peter Stolypin, in 1911. And when he photographed Leo Tolstoy at his Yasnaya Polyana estate in 1908, he surely knew of the great writer’s fulminations against the imperial regime and the Orthodox Church.

Nonetheless, with the eventual patronage of Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky embarked on a heroic enterprise to record the empire as none before him had done, an enterprise that continues to enrich our knowledge and vision decades later. The question is not what eluded his vision but how do we respond to that vision? What are the levels on which we can respond? These are by no means simple questions, and attempts to address them often have an ideological bent. “The Russia that we have lost”—who are “we” and what was “lost” after 1917?

The answers could well depend on the specific group considering the question. Among Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs of splendid Islamic monuments in Bukhara, there are portraits of haggard prisoners held under barbaric conditions. Some might argue that these portraits, together with those of ample local potentates, play into a European, orientalist narrative of Central Asian societies as semibarbaric. But such an interpretation is out of character for Prokudin-Gorsky and does not correspond to the direct humanity of his photographs. In any event few would regret the loss of the Emirate of Bukhara, a harshly repressive regime that at the time of Prokudin-Gorsky’s visit had the status of a Russian protectorate. But should we contemplate Prokudin-Gorsky’s specifically Russian photographs with-out an awareness of the other parts of the empire that was Russia?

A contemplation of the Prokudin-Gorsky photographs raises challenging questions of social and political history. Several of his photographs show Russian settlers and enterprises in the southern areas of the empire, but to whom had that land belonged? The perspective that Prokudin-Gorsky implicitly endorses in his photographs is that of Russians as bringers of progress and amelioration. This approach became especially pervasive after widespread peasant uprisings in 1905–6 that led to the “Stolypin reforms” of 1906. For the next half decade Peter Stolypin initiated policies for the re-settlement of hundreds of thousands of land-poor peasants from the Russian heartland to the empire’s peripheral areas—a process facilitated by railroad construction. Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs show evidence of this new Russian presence.

However, it was one thing when peasants were steered to uninhabited tracts in Siberia, and another when they were given plots in southern areas (particularly Turkestan) that were inhabited by non-Russian peoples. Already exposed to wealthy, extensively irrigated cotton estates (which Prokudin-Gorsky also photographed) in the Syr-Darya basin, significant elements of the non-Russia population harbored a festering resentment that contributed to the explosive Central Asian revolt of 1916. This uprising, exacerbated by wartime conscription of Muslims, spread through much of Turkestan (including the Samarkand region) in the latter half of 1916 and led to a staggering carnage that is referred to in contemporary Kyrgyzstan as “genocide.” Among other victims were Kazakhs and Russian settlers. The area that Prokudin-Gorsky had calmly photographed five years earlier was now torn by violence, while the photographer himself was at the other end of the empire at work on his last Russian expedition, to document construction of the strategic railroad to the new Arctic port of Murman (Murmansk). This urgent military project involved the forced labor of Central Powers prisoners-of-war, whom Prokudin-Gorsky also photographed.

The preceding comments should persuade us that nostalgic interpretations of Prokudin-Gorsky’s photography (“the Russia we have lost,” a sense of the lost idyll) may be superficially appealing, but they ignore a larger, at times devastating, context. We allow these photographs to transport us to reveries of the past, yet a knowledge of Russian history compels us to think about the future (now past) of the subjects portrayed. For example, to look at a group of children on a White Lake levee in Belozersk is to wonder what became of them in the next decade, after suffering years of war, social collapse, hunger, and savage violence. How many of them survived? The church in the background has long been a ruin, but what happened to the children?

The appealing, innocent faces of these and other children in Prokudin-Gorsky’s work remind us of the opening words of Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above the abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Photography is “light writing,” and with an awareness of history Prokudin-Gorsky’s photographs illuminate that Nabokovian moment. It might be added that Speak, Memory, first published as a single volume in 1951, is primarily devoted to a time and milieu that also nurtured Prokudin-Gorsky and was both forever lost and preserved through the writer’s memory.

Excerpted from "Journeys Through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky,” by William Craft Brumfield. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press. © 2020 Duke University Press. All rights reserved.

Photographic 'Journeys Through the Russian Empire' : William Craft Brumfield on the photographic legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. By Jennifer Eremeeva. The MoscowTimes, February 11, 2021. 

In honor of the 155th birthday of Russian chemist and photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky, Google has designed a special Doodle to celebrate the man's revolutionary work. Here are a few facts about the scientist and his important contribution to the craft of photography.

His birthday has changed over the years. Prokudin-Gorsky was born in August 1863, in the Vladimir region, east of Moscow. Because the Russian Empire used a slightly inaccurate system to count the days of the year borrowed from the Russian Orthodox Church, Prokudin-Gorsky's birthday was officially recorded on August 18, according to the Prokudin-Gorsky Project. Russia officially abandoned the orthodox Julian calendar with the formation of the Soviet Union, meaning Prokudin-Gorsky's birthday is actually on August 30.

He pioneered modern color photography. After training to become a chemist in Russia, Prokudin-Gorsky moved to Germany, where he met renowned photochemist Adolf Miethe and began studying under him. Building on the three-filter process of Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell, who had produced the first color photograph 40 years earlier, Prokudin-Gorsky and his teacher developed a photographic emulsion method that went beyond three-color photography to capture shades of colors in greater detail. The Doodle shows how, by running the same image through three different glass filters, Prokudin-Gorsky could recreate a composite picture of a landscape.

He photographed Leo Tolstoy. As Prokudin-Gorsky returned to Russia in the early 1900s, he began taking trips through the country, as well as to European countries such as Austria, Denmark, France, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland. He developed a reputation for his photography and became feted by high society. In May 1908 he visited the Yasnaya Polyana estate and took the first official color portrait of the country's most renowned living writer, 80-year-old Leo Tolstoy.

He toured Russia in a specialist vehicle, given to him by the tsar. Using what he had learned abroad, Prokudin-Gorsky undertook a documentary tour of the Russian Empire between 1909 and 1915. The photographer documented local sites, as well as the day-to-day rituals and habits of the country's many citizens. In order for him to be able to work on the go, Prokudin-Gorsky received a railroad car, outfitted to work as a darkroom for developing photographs, courtesy of Tsar Nicholas II. The photographer traveled to over 30 regions of the empire, including parts that today fall in Belarus, Finland and Ukraine.

He wanted to use cutting-edge photography to educate children. After plying his craft across Russia and elsewhere, Prokudin-Gorsky had amassed an extensive catalog of pictures. His idea was to use his "optical color projection" in the classroom, to teach Russian schoolchildren about the various traditions in the large empire.

He left Russia during the civil war, never to return. Sent on assignment to Norway in 1918, Prokudin-Gorsky never made it back to Russia, as his patron, the tsar, was toppled by revolutionaries and Vladimir Lenin forced the Bolsheviks into power. Prokudin-Gorsky eventually settled in France, where he died in 1944. His photographs remain one of the most impressive catalogs of Russia at the turn of the century, before the rise of the Soviet Union.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky: Facts and Pictures From Pioneering Color Photographer Celebrated in Google Doodle. By Damien Sharkov. Newsweek, August 30, 2018. 

More information and photographs here :  Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Unknown Genius of Colour Photography.  Carusel, April 22, 2020