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| Sergei Procoudine-Gorsky, Tour de Signal à Boukovo, |
Just when I thought I knew every museum in
Paris, I find one I have never previously even heard of. The Musée Zadkine at
Vavin is the former studio of the Cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine. As I wandered
through the light-filled rooms, looking out onto a peaceful garden filled with
Zadkine’s sculptures, I could only imagine the inspiration of such a space.
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| Garden at the Musée Zadkine |
I found this hidden Paris treasure because
the museum is currently exhibiting a series of photographs by Sergei
Procoudine-Gorsky, taken between 1909-16 as he travelled through Tsarist Russia
from the Urals to Samarkand, from Volga to Siberia, documenting his discoveries
in three-way colour glass transparencies. The display of the images at the
Musée Zadkine is moving and creative. They are interspersed with Zadkine’s
sculptures in light boxes attached both to the wall and to the floor. The
wonder of the photographs is that they are in colour, the result of a process
that was, at the time, unheard of. It is only because Procoudine-Gorsky had
access to the most avant-garde scientific developments — read wealth, education
and power — that he was able to document this vast and, for many, unforgiving
land. Eventually, Procoudine-Gorsky was commissioned by the Tsar himself to take
photographs and bring them home for all to wonder at.
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| Images on display at Musée Zadkine |
Procoudine-Gorsky documents Russia as it was,
as I learnt, knew it, and as I like to think it was meant to be. His images are
a document of Russia before the world pulled it to Moscow and St Petersburg,
when Russia beyond the two cities mattered. This is Russia when science and
technology valued the arts, when there was a concerted effort to take
technology and science to the farthest outreaches. It was a time before the
revolution, but of course, these images show none of the persecution, violence
and struggle of Tsarist Russia.
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| Sergei Procoudine-Gorsky, Habitants du Daghestan, 1904 |
In ThroughAmateur Eyes I discussed the early developments that enabled some of the
first colour photographs produced in Nazi Germany around the late 1930s. That
means that Procoudine-Gorsky’s transparencies are made 30 years prior. So the
photographs themselves are of historical interest as well as the interest in
what they photograph. In 1948 they were taken by the Library of Congress left
in archives until 2000 when they were restored and digitally transferred. What
isn’t made clear by the exhibition is the extent to which they were remastered
in the LOC’s digital scanning. Given the clarity and density of the hues, I am
assuming there was some colour enhancement. Nevertheless, the display on light
boxes shows with extraordinary clarity every detail of the scene, every blade
of grass and every straw of hay is discernible thanks to the three colour
process. The delicate reflections on water, and the soft clouds in the sky can
almost be touched, they are so crisp in reproduction. With this comes the flaws
and deterioration of the images, the bleeding of colours, the fading of cyan
blue from the stock that leave a reddish brown.
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| Sergei Procoudine-Gorsky, Church of the Resurrection in the Grove, Kostroma, 1910 |
What I loved most about the transparencies
is their capture of the stasis and silence of Russia, not only as this vast
land was on the cusp of industrialization and pre-Revolution, but also its
stasis that continued into the Brezhnev years and the Cold War. Long distance landscapes and shots of
villages nestled into the bend in a river, endless skies and untouched green
fields on perfectly clear days, the spires and domes of Orthodox churches,
local inhabitants posing for portraits in long shot, workers in fields, nothing
seems to move in this timeless world. The agrarian nature of the land, the
apparently idyllic world also reminded me of Tolstoy’s Russia, at least, those
parts of his world that have not been touched by the pressures and distortions of
the society he critiques.
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| Sergei Procoudine-Gorsky, Procoudine-Gorsky on the Karolitskhali River, Georgia |
To start visitors off on the romantic
journey into Russia of yesterday, the museum offers tea out of a samovar at the
entrance. The whole experience was one of walking into the dream of a world
that always looked much better in representation than reality.
All Procoudine-Gorsky's images copyright Library of Congress, Washington
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