Archive

Over the past three decades Russia have had steady interest to the photography as a full and active participant of the artistic process, a subject worthy of collecting, studying, exhibiting and subjecting to aesthetic critique. The Russian Museum has a representative collection based on historical and contemporary works of photography. One of the collections where such items are held is the Images Archive which has existed as a museum department under different names since 1922, but whose collection activity started with a resolution of the first meeting of the Council of the Russian Museum on July 4, 1897: to publish catalogues with photos of all museum exhibits and to photograph all the incoming works and those already in the museum holdings. Since then, the main sources for acquisitions were not only items made in the museum’s photolaboratory, but those transferred from its other departments, as well as from the State Hermitage Museum, the Academy of Arts, the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, palaces and other collections and archives. Now the collection has various material reflecting wide range of themes and is constantly expanding thanks to donors and participants of museum exhibitions of photography.