Quiet Resistance Istanbul Modern Photography Gallery presented the finest examples of Russian Pictorialism.

Istanbul Modern Photography Gallery presented the exhibition titled "Quiet Resistance – Pictorialism in Russian Photography", that shed a different light to the first half of the 20th century through the poetic repercussions of Pictorialism in Russian photography. With a selection of the works from contemporaneous artists who were influenced by one another and "rediscovered" in Russia in the mid 1990s the exhibition presented a segment from the development of Russian art at the turn of the 20th century, as well as a glimpse into the country’s cultural history.

The representatives of the Pictorialist epoch defend the notion that aesthetics reigns over content and that the harmony and balance in a photograph are more important than the depiction of reality. By employing plays of light and soft toning thorough various techniques, they create dramatic and poetic works. While trying to ascribe a new individuality and reality to photography through their personal forms of expression and their perspectives, Pictorialists also believe that the purpose of true art is the recreation of reality and nature. Pictorial photography was seen as opposing documentary shots, primarily aiming, just like painting, to introduce an emotional dimension into the work, to express the individual sensibility and meaning that its authors desired to convey. Following the October Revolution, the masters of Russian pictorial photography were exposed to the cruelty and oppression of the totalitarian regime in the 1920s.

Desiring to express their existence and aesthetic experience, Pictorialists were accused of being nostalgic about the pre-revolutionary world, and upholding bourgeois values over the theory of class conflict. Despite the pressures, Russian Pictorialist photographers remained dedicated to their own sense of the aesthetic and eventually assumed their place among the classics of national and universal art.

The exhibition, a summary of Russian Pictorialism, displayed the works of a series of artists that lived in the same epoch and influenced one another. 194 vintage prints by 18 Russian photographers from 1890s to the 1940s, which are examples of an aesthetic opposition to militant Soviet ideology, were exhibited.

Artists: Sergei Kuzmich Ivanov-Alliluev, Nikolai Platonovich Andreev, Emil Sigizmundivich Bendel, Yuriy Petrovich Eremin, Alexander Danilovich Grinberg, Andrei Osipovich Karelin, Piotr Vladimirovich Klepikov, Sergei Alexandrovich Lobovikov, Aleksei Sergeevich Mazurin, Nikolai Alexandrovich Petrov, Sergei Ivanovich Savrasov, Miron Abramovich Sherling, Leonid Vladimirovich Shockin, Nikolai Ivanovich Svishchov-Paola, Alexander Mikhailovich Rodchenko, Anatoly Ivanovich Trapani, Vassily Ivanovich Ulitin, Boris Sergeevich Yeliseev

Curator: Olga Sviblova