Brumfield , William Craft Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 183 Brumfield, William Craft. Journeys through the Russian Empire: The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Duke University Press, Durham, NC and London, 2020. xi + 518 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $49.95: £43.00. The photographs taken by Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii in the decade before the 1917 Revolution, held since the 1940s in the Library of Congress, provide one of the richest sources of material evidence available to scholars of late imperial Russia. During the years after 1905, Prokudin-Gorskii undertook a series of expeditions across large swathes of the Russian Empire, typically with the active support of the tsarist authorities, photographing both the traditional architecture of provincial cities and the industrial paraphernalia of factories and railways that were rapidly transforming the country. The striking colour images, made possible by Prokudin-Gorskii’s long experiments with photography, were part of an ambitious project to create a visual portrait that would acknowledge the diversity of the Russian provinces while celebrating the way they formed part of a single empire. The semi-official character of his work, and its underlying commitment to using photography to create patterns of knowledge that fostered a sense of the unity of the empire, naturally lends itself to a set of discourses about such topics as ‘the imperial gaze’ and the ‘orientalist imagination’. And yet, while the interpretation of all historical photographs requires a lively sense of the context in which they were produced, the importance of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work extends far beyond its contribution to an imperial discourse that celebrated the unknown while subtly embedding it within a framework of the familiar. William Craft Brumfield has produced a work that combines text and illustrations in a way that illuminates the contemporary interest of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work both for scholars and a wider public. Brumfield, one of the foremost Western experts on the history of Russian architecture, has over the past fifty years himself photographed many of the sites visited by Prokudin-Gorskii, ranging from the ‘Ancient Heartland’ through to more far-flung areas such as the Urals and Central Asia. Much of Journeys through the Russian Empire is devoted to comparing Brumfield’s own photographs with those of his illustrious predecessor. This is a modus operandi that could easily become tiresome, but such a prospect is avoided in the book, both because Brumfield’s own photographs are of exceptional quality, and because there is something enthralling for the reader about comparing pictures of a building or set of buildings taken many years apart. Since Brumfield was not able, by definition, to photograph buildings destroyed in the Soviet period, a careless reading of the book might run the risk of giving the impression that the architectural fabric of Russia — and especially its churches and monasteries SEER, 99, 1, JANUARY 2021 184 — has changed surprisingly little despite decades of chaos and destruction. The author’s beautifully crafted text is, however, adept at informing the reader about what has been lost — through war, revolution and the depredations of time — as well as what has been preserved. Brumfield is well-aware that Prokudin-Gorskii’s vivid illustrations can easily fuel an ill-informed nostalgia for a lost Russia. His discussion of the history of the churches and cathedrals that form the subject of most photographs is erudite and informative without providing unnecessary detail. The same is true of the chapter dealing with the Islamic architecture of Central Asia (in particular Bukhara and Samarkand). Brumfield’s introductory and concluding essays provide a thoughtful insight into the history of the Prokudin-Gorskii collection, artfully showing how it can cast light both on the history of Russian architecture and the preoccupations of pre-revolutionary Russia, while representing something more than a simple representation of the appearance of the provinces on the eve of revolution. Any criticisms of this excellent book cannot begin to dent its achievements. The photographs focus on ecclesiastical architecture, as is to be expected given Brumfield’s own interests and personal photographic odyssey, with the result that the anthropological value of the Prokudin-Gorskii collection is only touched on quite briefly in the photographs and written text. And, while Brumfield talks a good deal in his...