Primrose: Early Colour Photography in Russia – The Photographers’ Gallery, London

This is a small but focused exhibition which readily achieves its dual aims of presenting the history of colour photography in Russia, and the history of Russia through colour photography.  Spread over two floors of the Photographers’ Gallery in Central London, it is divided into chronological sections which show how colour technology developed in Russia from the 1860s to 1970s, but also how photography was utilised by the official and counter cultures during this time of social upheaval.

The exhibition begins with hand-painted photographs, mostly portraits, which commemorated the lives and families of the nobility, soldiers joining the army, and some early industrial landscapes.  My favourites were the portraits of soldiers, where a combination of enthusiastic overpainting and fading of the underlying print give many of the photographs a sense of unreality.  Support from the Royal family also saw a series of documentary photographs in colour from this period which are fascinating.  The early Soviet period is then represented mostly by the photomontage works of Rodchenko and others, which “…allowed the documentary aspect of photography to be combined with new Soviet myths.”  This was the harnessing of photographic technology to ideological aims, and features the usual strapping athletes and contented citizens in striking compositions.  The Thaw under Kruschchev after Stalin’s death had a similarly visible effect on photographers, and the period is mostly represented by the work of Dmitri Baltermants, whose documentary photographs of Soviet cities and subjects, as well as official state visits, provide a wealth of information about what life was like for the ordinary person or the privileged few.  As colour technology spread in the 1970s, it was also used as a countercultural tool, and the exhibition ends with the work of Boris Mikhailov, who has collected and combined slides originally intended for private viewing, which on their own and as a curated whole work to deconstruct soviet myths.

The exhibition is part of the UK Russia Year of Culture 2014, now downplayed for obvious reasons to the point where I wasn’t aware it was happening until about a week ago.  It is however well researched and well curated, and deserved to be seen by as wide an audience as possible, given its close examination of the use and manipulation of photography and the photographer, often for political ends; a topic which few would deny still has relevance today.