The Art of Photography

The photography collection of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts is a set of unique visual materials connected with the art of photography representing changes in artistic styles, the development of photographic techniques, and the evolution of technologies and visual language.

The photography fund was organized in 1986 and was stored initially in the Manuscripts Department. The Art of Photography Department was established in 2009, and the development of this collection has become one of the department’s most important priorities. In 2018, the photography fund of The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts house 1599 depository items. The collection covers the period from the 1880s to the 2010s, and contains works by 135 authors, both Russian and foreign, belonging to different schools and movements.

The collection includes pre-revolutionary photography (Pierre Choumoff, Moisei Nappelbaum); Soviet photography of the 1920s–1930s (Boris Ignatovich, Alexander Rodchenko, Arkady Shaikhet); photographs of the so-called “The Sixtiers”, participants of the photo club “Novator” (Anatoly Boldin, Alexander Vikhansky, Mikhail Dashevsky, Anatoly Erin); the conceptual projects of the 1970s–1980s are represented by the works of various schools that were established within the former USSR – St. Petersburg, Minsk, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Chernivtsi, and Lithuania (Gennady Bodrov, Alexander Lapin, Alexander Kitaev, Galina Moskaleva, Oleg Malyovany, Marlene Matus, Vyacheslav Tarnovetsky, Vitas Luckus); contemporary Russian photography – works by Oleg Videnin, Vadim Gushchin, Alla Esipovich, Gregory Maiofis, Evgeny Nesterov, Valeri Nistratov, Yuri Palmin, Andrew Polushkin, Olga Tobreluts, Andrey Chezhin, Valera and Natasha Cherkashin and others). A significant part of the fund consists of photographs by photographers from Spain, Italy, the USA, Eastern Europe and East Asia (Peter Lindbergh, Roger Ballen, Mario Giacomelli, Clark & Pougnaud, Steve Yates, Gérard Rancinan, Almond Chu and others).