Primrose: Early Colour Photography in Russia

The Photographers’ Gallery
London W1

4/5 

For the young Soviet state photographic imagery was a vital aspect of the attempt to educate and inform a population that was still 70 per cent illiterate. 

That imperative is shown in this fascinating free exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery — part of the UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014 — which includes examples of early Soviet works by Rodchenko and Stepanova which utilise photomontage and tinted backgrounds to produce vivid and rousing images.

But the exhibition, dubbed Primrose because in Russia it is the first colourful flower to appear in Spring, is much more than this. It showcases the appearance and development of colour in Russian photography from the 1860s to the 1970s. 

It presents both the history of Russian photography and the history of Russia through photography, depicting life over the course of a century as the country underwent unprecedented upheavals. 

On one floor we have pre-20th century photographs — mainly portraits and landscapes that still very much reflect the influence of social-realist painters in their compositions and subject matters. 

They are tinted in a truly painterly fashion too with some, like those of Vasily Ulitin, looking like canvases by a Corot or Monet.

The upper floor is devoted to the 20th century, from early Soviet photographs through to the earliest genuine colour photos and diapositives (slides).

Colour photography only really emerged as an accessible means of image-making not long before the outbreak of the second world war but that war prevented the Soviet Union importing colour stock from Germany or the US. In the end it developed its own colour film, based on the German Agfa method. This gave Soviet film and photography its uniquely soft, pastel-colouring.

In the 1970s unofficial culture developed rapidly and inexpensive colour transparency film was made available to the general public. Amateur photographers used it to create slideshows accessible to a small circle of like-minded people for home viewing.

Here, a selected show of such transparencies, made mainly by amateurs, are suprisingly imaginative. They range from still lifes and nudes in domestic settings to Dada-like surrealist images, including one of two rabbit carcasses lying next to each other like two humans reclining on a table. 

The exhibition is arranged in chronological order and shows the development of photographic colour technology and the social transformations which altered the role of photography in Russian society. 

Early experiments range from hand-tinting of images to early 20th-century tri-plate isochromatic photographs and autochromes. From the mid-1940s to the early 1960s costly colour film was used only by a small number of official publications to reflect socialist realist concepts. The Khrushchov thaw from the mid-1950s onwards saw much of Stalin’s repression reversed, allowing photography to move closer to everyday reality, as reflected in Dmitri Baltermants’s photographs.

Ends October 19, opening times: (020) 7087-9300.