Decorative photography in Russia

To begin with, interior is not a highly artistic work of designers and architects built in according with the laws of good and beauty. It is, as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia explains, just the inner space of a building or some premises. The noun “interior” itself is formed from the French word “intérieur” that means “inner, inside”.

As for decorative photograph, it can be, as we have already told, any photograph for which there has been found a visible place in interior. Correspondingly, the history of decorative photograph begins exactly when the first customer who had ordered a family portrait decided to hang it on the wall to his own joy and for his descendants’ edification.

However, one thing is that a pet dog’s portrait lost somewhere on the bookshelves or amateur photos hanging over the table and renewed as those depicted on them are forgotten, and quite another story is photographs beautifying your home,  filling it with sense, reflecting and forming the world around you. We will try to reconstruct the way such world-forming photography was getting into our homes.

For Russian average people photography started in the first half of the 19th century. It was the time when the first daguerreotype studios appeared where those who so desired could order their portraits or a keepsake photograph of a family celebration (though that celebration had to be staged straight at the studio). By the turn of the century every house from the tsar’s palace to the worst peasant’s log hut had such “documents of the epoch”.

However, while for the tsar’s family photography was an attempt to keep up the passion for the technological progress, in poor houses a photographic portrait of the father of a family could substitute a gala portrait painted by a local artist.  To get a photograph one did not have to spend hours standing motionlessly in an uncomfortable posture and put up with the smell of paints and turpentine inside the house.  Above all a photograph was incomparably cheaper than even a third-rate painting.

The only objection that clouded the triumph of photography was its size. The first Russian photography studio owned by Alexey Grekov was luring customers by promising them a photographic portrait the size of a snuffbox.

No wonder that photographs were not hanged on the walls but kept in special albums. People were scrutinizing them in the light of the lamp while sitting comfortably at the table.

Later a photograph size was enlarged a bit but not so much as to let one admire it in a dim room at a 2-3 meter distance from it. Nevertheless, photographs began to get out from under the backs of the albums and settle on the shelves and walls. However it still was not the beginning of the interior conquest.

In intelligents’ town houses photographs began their triumphant march from studies. In rustic homes they settled down in front rooms at once. The point was not only that in such houses there were no studies at all. At the close of the century it became very popular amidst low-class people to color black-and-white photographs with a brush. The result was such brightly-coloured photographic pictures in a primitivistic style. Was it possible to hide such beauty from people?

The revolution became the greatest impulse for the art of photography to find its honorable place in not too wealthy houses of common people. Before that time every respectable house had its “Holy corner”. There were icons, hanging icon lamps and candles kept in it. It was decorated with paper flowers or embroidered towels; on the Trinity Sunday the corner was full of birch branches while at Easter people used consecrated pussy-willow twigs as decoration. It was nearly impossible to find a house without such a Holy corner.

After the Revolution religion was declared “the opium of the people”. Keeping “cult items” in one’s home had become something “not comme il faut” and even dangerous so that «holy corners» became empty. Some shook “the legacy of the bloody past” off their feet and went on with their heads held up. Some hid their icons from spiteful eyes in a more secluded nook. Emptiness was yawning instead of  “holy corners”.

But nature abhors a vacuum. Iconostasis consisting of the photographs of the wife and husband, of their children, grandchildren and near relatives filled it quickly as the “seven evils”. It was not necessarily placed in the right corner that was far from the front door of the room. But what is interesting, it was often decorated with the same paper flowers, embroidered towels and branches.

This is the way photography became a rather constituent element of interior.

In upper-class houses which became poorer appreciably after the Revolution, photography came to fill in the voids which had substituted paintings expropriated or already unobtainable for common soviet people. However, color and black-and-white photographic reproductions of paintings were still rivaling portrait and landscape photographs. They were, in fact, the same photographs but seen a bit differently.

A qualitative leap took place in the late 1960s. It affected two directions at once.

First, hanging photographs on the wall became a symbol of belonging to a circle. Hemingway, Einstein or Esenin smoking a pipe  - such A4 portraits mounted with a thin frame were a bid for some kind of refinement. You  could detect subtle but  rather distinct differences between social strata judging upon whose portrait was looking at you from the wall.

Second, photographic product which was used only in inferior was put on the market. It was photographic wallpaper. Kilometers of people were queuing up for them.  Some were even signing up to buy them. Some were trying to get such wallpapers pulling the strings of half-forgotten and absolutely unpleasant connections. They were even made capital on. Birch forests began to rustle in flats of the Khrushchev era.

Those glittering and a bit blurred pictures were not photographic masterpieces but they were making the room wider while creating the illusion. It was not the illusion of life close to nature but at least the illusion of successful urban way of life. Besides, they were and still are the only decorative photographs in their pure form. It is the peak, the climax. No decorative photograph will be able to become a fuller embodiment of the genre than those pitiful and tasteless photographic wallpapers which once served as decoration and pride for a citizen of the Soviet Russia.

However, it was not the end of the decorative photography history. It kept on flowing using other sources for its flow.

The matter is that the word combination ‘interior décor” entered our life when the Perestroika had began and especially when it had ended. And it was the time when decorative photography for interior got lots of opportunities. We will speak about it in the next article.

Text by Tatyana Hein 

Specially for Decorative and fine art photography shop Foto[O₂]

No part text or photographs may be used without the prior written permission of the foto[O₂] shop management or the reference to the  www.fotoo2.ru website.