Russia's First Photojournalist

Maxim Dmitriev, 1890s

A well-dressed man with a flowing beard is stepping cautiously as he makes his way up a dusty hill. Carefully guiding a small cart loaded with lacquered wooden boxes, he tries not to rattle his load. The man strains as he pushes his cart to the summit, where he pauses to take in the view. Below, rushing between steep banks and sandy shoals, cutting a path through gullies and forested slopes, Russia’s mighty Volga stretches from one horizon to the other.

Old Believers in the village of Kuznetsovo, Semyonovsky uyezd, late 1890s.(Photo courtesy of Russian Museum of Photography, Nizhny Novgorod)

The man begins unpacking his load. Out comes a massive tripod, an unwieldy portable camera, and 12-inch glass plates. It will soon be ten years since he began one of history’s greatest photographic essays: a chronicle of the Volga from its headwaters to its delta, spanning nearly 3,700 kilometers and capturing thousands of images, a hundred cities and villages, and the way of life of dozens of peoples. In short, it captures the state of a nation on the verge of the twentieth century.

The man’s name was Maxim Petrovich Dmitriev. His ancestors were serfs, and he was both a talented artist and a successful entrepreneur. Photography was his art and his business, but he also used it to highlight pressing social issues.

Dmitriev was Russia’s first photojournalist. Equally talented at taking portraits of nobles and beggars, his photo archive came to include both great writers and destitute gypsies. He earned good money through studio photography and spent tens of thousands of rubles on his documentary projects (what those in the business today call “personal projects”).

His documentary work garnered enthusiastic reviews for their authenticity and relevance – and ended up being criticized for the same qualities. His photographs won dozens of awards at exhibits in Russia and abroad. Albums of his work were wildly successful, yet Dmitriev became neither a star nor a legend. He did, however, preserve an entire era for posterity.

Maxim Dmitriev was born in 1858, in the village of Povalishno, Tambov Province, about 500 kilometers southeast of Moscow. His mother, Alexandra, was a domestic serf. Nothing is known of Dmitriev’s father, only that the child was born out of wedlock.

When Maxim was two, he was sent to the neighboring province to be raised by a childless serf, Elisey Kupriyanov. Once he was old enough, he attended the church school, where he was taught reading and writing, arithmetic, religion, and basic history. In a country where the vast majority of the population was illiterate, this was a decent education, and Maxim graduated near the top of his class.

As was typical for the children of serfs, Maxim began working odd jobs at an early age. While living with his adopted father, he wove baskets to sell and could, for a fee, read prayers for the deceased. When Maxim turned 14, Kupriyanov took him to Moscow to get him a job in a china shop, and from there Maxim went to work for a bookbinder. As a general rule, children and teenagers worked as “errand boys” in such places, with room, board, and experience as their only compensation. They performed unskilled labor for free and learned the trade as they went.

It appears that Maxim’s mother stayed in contact with him as he was growing up and continually worried over his well-being. When she found out that the bookbinder was treating Maxim poorly, she traveled to Moscow and found him a new, more promising patron. The position was in the studio of the famous photographer Mikhail Petrovich Nastyukov, who had been granted the right to photograph members of the imperial family. Dmitriev signed an indentured servitude contract requiring him to work in Nastyukov’s studio for six years.

Nastyukov was a creative figure and appeared to have a talent for drawing other talented people into his orbit. Sometime around 1872, Dmitriev became his apprentice and started learning the trade, entrusted with cleaning the glass that was then used to make photographic plates. The assiduous boy mastered the process in weeks, then began learning to make prints and even retouch photographs.

With Nastyukov’s permission, Maxim applied to attend weekend courses at the Stroganov School for Technical Drawing, one of Russia’s oldest art schools. There, Dmitriev mastered the principles of drawing and painting, which helped him go beyond the level of a gifted amateur.

Moscow may have been where Dmitriev got his start, but Nizhny Novgorod is where he won his fame. He first traveled there in the mid-1870s as Nastyukov’s assistant, and during his free time he would wander around the fair and the city, taking pictures of streets, people, and landscapes.

The city on the Volga – one of the Russian Empire’s largest and wealthiest – was famous for its annual fair. People of all sorts of trades mingled in the endless expanses of the market, including photographers. Many set up temporary studios at the fair and earned decent profits during the season.

In Nizhny, Maxim met a photographer then renowned throughout Europe, Andrei Osipovich Karelin – one of those rare people whose genius, combined with a supreme curiosity and perseverance, allows them to advance several steps ahead of their era. Using rather primitive technology — compared to modern times — Karelin worked wonders.

Dmitriev would have gladly remained in Nizhny as Karelin’s assistant, but serfs did not write their own futures, and his six-year contract of servitude prevented him from making the move. Fortunately, however, in 1877 Nastyukov decided to sell his business, which absolved Dmitriev of his obligations.

Over the next few years Dmitriev lived in Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, and Oryol, perfecting his photographic skills, assisting experienced masters, including Karelin, and saving up to start his own photo salon.

By the mid 1880s Dmitriev was ready. He returned to Nizhny to look for a suitable location. He found it in the centrally located building that had once housed Karelin’s studio and was therefore familiar to potential clients. The building’s owner, the merchant Avdotia Paltseva, was a forward-thinking businesswoman and agreed to make alterations to the space. In 1886, having received official permission to open his photo studio, Dmitriev began his trade as an independent photographer.

Dmitriev’s renovated studio was state of the art for his day. The first floor boasted plate-glass windows displaying his work. The second floor housed a waiting room for clients and the studio itself, with huge windows that let in lots of natural light.

The building also allowed ample room for a laboratory, and storage space for equipment, negatives, materials, and camera supplies that Dmitriev sold. There was even space for a phototype workshop, which printed postcards for sale, including views of the surrounding area and the fair, as well as portraits of the people who lived along the Volga, both ordinary and famous.

Dmitriev also monetized his friendship with the Peshkov family, particularly Alexei Maximovich – better known to the world as Maxim Gorky. Dmitriev made several iconic portraits of Gorky and sold them as postcards. He did the same with photographs of other famous contemporaries, which was considered perfectly acceptable at the time.

Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Shalyapin, Nizhny Novgorod, 1901. (Photo courtesy of Russian Museum of Photography, Nizhny Novgorod).

Commercial success came easily. And had he been content with just that, it is unlikely the world would have remembered him a century later.

For while Dmitriev was skilled as a portrait and landscape photographer, it was his work capturing ordinary life – his mastery of artistic, journalistic sketches of the peoples and places he knew so well – that marked his place in history.

In 1889, at Moscow’s All-Russian Exhibit in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of photography, Dmitriev caused a minor uproar. He displayed some fifty photographs that included not just Volga landscapes, but also deeply realistic individual and group portraits: cripples, beggars, mendicants, holy fools, wanderers, junk dealers, residents of homeless shelters, tattered peasants, farm hands, and stevedores.

Experts crowded around his works, while amateurs expressed their admiration, and conservatives their disdain. How did these dregs of society deserve such attention? Why portray the dirty and the ragged, when there were more worthy and beautiful subjects?

After Moscow, Dmitriev sent his works to exhibits throughout Russia and abroad. In response he received honorary certificates, medals, esteem, and respect. But also occasional opprobrium.

At an exhibit in Paris, among other works, Dmitriev displayed a photograph entitled “Convicts on a Construction Project.” It did not go unnoticed by the exhibit’s attendants and the members of the international jury. Dmitriev received a gold medal, yet his countryman Count Nostits, a critic and correspondent, reacted to the photographs with disdainful incredulity. Russians have long disliked it when their country’s seamier side is shown to the outside world.

Dmitriev’s most piercing, heartrending photo essay was made during the famine that struck Russia’s Black Earth and central Volga regions in 1891-1892.

A street fight. The inscription on the building reads: “Drink no vodka, sing no songs, conduct yourself peacefully.

Year of Famine, 1891-92. A public cafeteria set up by S.S. Veshnyakova in the village of Novaya Sloboda, Lukoyanovsky uyezd, Nizhegorodsky gubernia. (Photo courtesy of Russian Museum of Photography, Nizhny Novgorod)

A pilgrim at a Volga monastery. Dmitriev was able to gain unusual access to many religious sites.

An anomalously frigid and dry fall and winter, followed by the early, hot, drought-stricken summer of 1890, decimated the harvest in the country’s expansive fertile regions. Everything had been eaten, down to the last little seed, and no centralized reserves had been laid in. Government and society attempted to aid the regions struck by the disaster, but the effort’s organization was not up to the task.

A humanitarian crisis unfolded as two consecutive epidemics spread across the affected regions: typhoid fever in the winter and cholera in the summer.

It was in these circumstances that Dmitriev set off on his photo shoot, having obtained written permission from provincial authorities. He rode through empty and destitute rural areas, taking photos of darkened villages, empty fields, sooty hovels, and peasants blackened by hunger and deprivation.

He took pictures of abandoned, roofless houses; the thatch had been fed to livestock, since the grass in the fields had been burnt by the sun. He entered shelters for cholera patients and homes where entire families lay together in typhoid fever-induced delirium. He also photographed those who came to help the dying peasants: nurses and doctors, teachers, local officials, and volunteers operating free soup kitchens.

Day of the White Daisy. Collecting donations to battle tuberculosis,
Annunciation Square, Nizhny Novgorod, late 1890s. (Note the young boy holding a daisy in the background.) (Photo courtesy of Russian Museum of Photography, Nizhny Novgorod)

A typhus hospital in Novaya Sloboda, during the famine year of 1891-2.

A year later, Dmitriev published his photographs in a book titled The Lean Year in Nizhny Novgorod Province, 1891-1892. It overwhelmed all who saw it: never before had anyone in Russia shown the suffering of the people in such an expressive and artistic form or with such merciless accuracy. It represented an important contribution to the intelligentsia’s wave of discussion and criticism.

The book was highly esteemed by Lev Tolstoy, who even then was a towering figure with immense authority, actively participating in discussion of the drought and in collecting donations for the affected. Dmitriev’s photographs were published in multiple reprints and became illustrations in other books. Lean Year became a model for exemplary resolve and set a high standard for social responsibility in photojournalism.

Dmitriev is also well-known for his other monumental work, The Volga: The Headwaters to the Caspian. The project took him ten years to complete, from 1894 to 1903. Dmitriev walked, rode, and swam all of the river’s 3,690 kilometers, from its headwaters near a village lost in the forests of Tver Province, to the city of Astrakhan, sprawled across the Volga delta.

Of course, the project was not carried out as a single, uninterrupted expedition. Dmitriev broke it down into sections, returning again and again to his favorite topic whenever he could, toting his hefty camera and a set of photosensitive glass plates, some measuring up to 50 by 60 centimeters (almost two feet square), across the rough landscape. He would look for notable places, lookout points, architectural and natural landmarks, patiently waiting for the appropriate season, weather, and light. While the technology of that era was already producing lenses of sufficient quality for sharp images, finding the right exposure could be challenging, as the light sensitivity of the plates was not high, requiring longer exposures that often blurred the images.

Dmitriev’s Volga series is pensive and observational. It is the portrait of a river that is Russia’s symbol, a portrait of a Volga we will never see again. Its landscapes are calm and peaceful, showing nature in all its diversity, still unencumbered by civilization. Bridges, barges, railroads, monasteries, power grids and factories were all there, and were documented by Dmitriev, but somehow they fade into the background and dissolve into the endless expanses of the river itself.

Among his classic views of the Volga are photos that even now would be called journalistic: he “caught” fishermen as they worked, or a sudden fire as it broke out.

But the central and most fully developed genre in the series is the landscape.

Simultaneously with his Volga series, Dmitriev made numerous “postcard” photographs. These included views of Nizhny Novgorod, beautiful sights and landmarks around the province, and notable architecture. Perhaps of most interest to audiences in the twenty-first century are his portraits of the typical representatives of various trades and of the various ethnicities living in the Volga region.

Taking pictures of people was by no means easier than landscapes. After all, characteristic subjects needed to be found, and they had to assent to having their photos taken. For example, normally the heads of hermitage monasteries unequivocally refused to allow photography on their land. Dmitriev nonetheless won a degree of cooperation, which allowed him to produce the fascinating series “Faithful Russia.”

Trinity Monastery in Selizharovo, along the Volga, late 1890s. (Photo courtesy of Russian Museum of Photography, Nizhny Novgorod)

Making spoons in the village of Deyanovo, Semyonovsky uyezd, 1897.

The 16th All Russian Artistic-Industrial Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, 1896. (Photo courtesy of Russian Museum of Photography, Nizhny Novgorod)

After almost half a century of immensely productive work, Dmitriev was finally disrupted. It was less a matter of his advancing age than the intrusion of history.

When the Soviets came to power, Dmitriev, who had a successful business and thus employees, was classified as a bourgeois exploiter. At first, he was punished with an onerous tax, and he continued to work, albeit without profits. Gorky intervened on his old friend’s behalf on numerous occasions, asking the authorities to consider the merits of the photographer’s work. However, the financial and psychological pressures continued.

Dmitriev worked through the 1920s and 1930s, photographing official events on the orders of government representatives and documenting city life. In one instance, he was forced to witness and photograph the destruction of an ancient cathedral in Nizhny Novgorod.

Somehow, neither Dmitriev nor any of his family members were murdered during the difficult years of the Civil War, the Purges, and the Second World War, although at one point his son-in-law did come very close to being put before a firing squad. All the same, both Dmitriev and history suffered an irretrievable loss. In the late 1920s, his building was transferred to the Children’s Commission. Some 7,000 negatives were confiscated and trucked away (to be kept in museums and archives). Rumor has it that some of his glass plates were used to make greenhouses.

The elderly Maxim Petrovich, in poor health and nearly blind, passed away in 1948 at the age of 90, in the home of his son-in-law. Today, his former studio houses the Russian Museum of Photography. Known unofficially as Dmitriev and his teacher Karelin’s Museum, it sits in the heart of Nizhny Novgorod, less than a kilometer from the Volga River that gave such meaning and focus to the photographer’s life. RL