Primrose: Early Colour Photography in Russia

Primrose: Early Colour Photography in Russia is quite possibly the strangest exhibition I have ever seen and I think I might have done better to have read up a bit more about it before committing to going....

I studied Russian at university, I went to Moscow in 1992 and am very fascinated by Russian propaganda art - the big stuff that I saw in Moscow painted on the sides of walls, so I was quite keen to go to this, but it really wasn't what I was expecting.

Sure enough, the exhibition was quite interesting from a historical perspective, i.e. to see the development of colour photography in line with social development, and I learnt about historical aspects of colour photography that I never realised, for instance the actual physical painting over (salt / albumen?) prints using various media including oils, bromoil, crayon and gouache and around 1910 pearl fragments, but to be honest, the results didn't look very photographic.  In fact they looked more like some of the bizarre stuff you can do in photoshop now!  It also struck me thought that to really appreciate something like this, you need to know about print developing and its history, which I don't.

Arranged in chronological order (assuming you worked out the right way to walk round as it wasn't obvious...), some observations:

• pre-1900s - pictures were tiny delicate portraits, but the subjects seemed soulless and vacant
• 1900 - bigger prints
• 1908 - offprint of Leo Tolstoy - at last a person that looks almost real
• 1910 - focus on transport and infrastructure themes; words like collotype and offprint appearing..people however still do not look real
• 1910 - Prokudin-Gorsky - images starting to look more photographic, but they are tiny still
• 1920s - communist propaganda style collages but they don't have the wow factor that the posters do
• 1935 - Rodchenko - portrait of Regina Lemberz  - very creepy
• 1950s - some interesting street photography and reportage

Finally, at the end, a 1970s PDI slideshow (transparency film) representing the type that people would host in their homes of what quite frankly was an extremely weird collection of photographs that included:

• appalling amateur porn (this was wrong on so many levels...)
• scenes of metaphoric porn
• fantasies
• surreal scenes
• and a few normal scenes of landscape/people.

Odd...


Websites:

• The Photographers Gallery: Primrose: Early Colour Photography in Russia http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/primrose-russian-colour-photography-2 [accessed 4 October 2014]