William C. Brumfield Photographs of Russian Architecture

Description

From the first trips to Russia and Central Asia in the early 1970’s to recent trips across Siberia, Professor William C. Brumfield’s field research and photographic work has documented religious and secular structures in cities and the countryside, and across cultures. Showing preservation and decay, with views of buildings now lost, under construction, and restored, all carefully documented. The material includes not only major monuments such as palaces, state buildings, cathedrals, churches, synagogues and mosques, but also a street-by-street documentation of buildings within the pre-revolutionary boundaries of cities such as St. Petersburg. The many thousands of photographs in the collection have been scanned in the TIFF format and are all precisely identified (via Photoshop Fileinfo) by address and date of the photograph. This specificity allows a correlation with major cultural topics in architecture and the arts, including literature, music (opera, ballet, symphonic) and the visual arts. In the broadest sense the audience for this web archive includes anyone interested in urban culture.

The Brumfield Collection is closely related to numerous major publications including: Gold in Azure: one thousand years of Russian architecture (1983), A History of Russian Architecture (1993, second edition, 2004), Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (1991), An Architectural Survey of St. Petersburg, 1840-1916: Building Inventory (1994), Lost Russia (1995), and an architectural heritage series, beginning in 2005, for sites including: Totma, Vologda, Irkutsk, Tobolsk, Cherdyn, Kargopol, Velikiĭ Ustiug, Solikamsk, Chita, Solovki, and Buriatiia. The main collection of this work (over 150,000 items) is held on a server at the National Gallery of Art. William Brumfield retains all usage and permissions rights.