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Orlando Figes is a specialist in Russian history from the 18th century onwards, teaching at Birkbeck College in London. He writes extensively for the press and his books include A People's Tragedy: the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 and Natasha's Dance, which was recently nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He presents the documentary The Tsar's Last Picture Show for BBC Four.
BBC Four: When did you first come across Gorsky's pictures?
Orlando Figes: I found the book Photographs for the Tsar shortly after it came out in 1980.
I was blown away by the pictures. Colour does bring back to life the texture
of Russia before 1917. Because I'd never seen pictures from that early my
imagination of Russia was always in black and white, so to see them in
colour just made it feel like yesterday. When the BBC approached me about
making a film I agreed because Gorsky is just such an interesting figure.
BBC Four: The range of material that he covered was quite wide including portraits, architectural studies, landscapes…
OF: Yes and no. Considering the technique he had to use to get the colour, the
quality of the print is very high and I think they have an artistic quality
which is unusual for the period. On the other hand, I think perhaps because
of the technique, they are slightly static. There are a lot of pictures of
buildings and people in pose. He couldn't take pictures of moving objects
because he had to take three separate exposures in immediate succession to get
colour - so that's one technical limitation.
Because he was working for the
Tsar there's also a political limitation on the subject matter - Gorsky's
pictures have a kind of iconic element. He's taking pictures of churches,
national monuments, landscapes and so on. But what we've done in the film
is to bring out what we see as some of the ambiguities within the pictures -
Gorsky is not just a lackey of the Tsar and the pictures which he took were
far more interesting than they may first seem. They bring out the humanity
of his subjects - peasants, tribesmen, individuals from various parts of the
Russian empire. So one feels a sort of tension between his commission for
the Tsar and his own democratic sympathies.
BBC Four: So you would say that he had quite liberal impulses?
OF: Yes, and you can see it in the photographs I think. He's not just taking
pictures of ethnographic types, he's taking pictures of individual people
for whom he feels sympathy. In his biography you can see he was deeply
committed to the medium of photography for education, he wanted to use his
images in schools, to educate people. He saw it as an important medium in
Russia where most people were illiterate. He taught photography in an
institute in Petrograd which had a very democratic intake. Although he had
to pursue the patronage of the Tsar, and this limited him politically, at
the same time he undoubtedly had democratic inclinations.
BBC Four: What consequence did his association with the Tsar have for him after the revolution?
OF: There's so much about Gorsky we can't know, but the one thing you can say
about him is that he was quite a wheeler dealer and always seemed to know
the right people at the right time. It's an amazing story. He wasn't a
very grand figure in himself, from a minor gentry family, not particularly
wealthy. He marries into an industrial family and this gave him a bit of
financial backing for his photography. The he manages to arrange an
exhibition attended by no less a figure than the Grand Duke Mikhail
Alexandrovich. The Grand Duke arranges the meeting with the Tsar who gives
his support to Gorsky's photographic journeys around the empire.
Yet here is
the mystery - because after 1917 Gorsky manages to make some sort of
accommodation with the Bolsheviks. Anatoly Lunacharsky who was the Commissar
of Enlightenment, a sort of arts and education minister in the government,
appoints Gorsky to a new professorship. The other mystery is how he managed
to get out of Russia after the murder of the imperial family in July 1918.
He left Petrograd with a load of photographic plates and escaped to Norway.
I reckon he couldn't have done that without the clearance of the
Bolsheviks. No one seems to know how he managed to escape - but it does show
that Gorsky was a man of extraordinary resources and some talent for making
the right connections.
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