Sep/20

The Final Years of the Russian Empire

No comments · Posted by Sergei Rzhevsky in History, People

Carl Oswald Bulla or Karl Karlovich Bulla (1855-1929), a portraitist and master of documentary photography, was the owner of a photo studio in St. Petersburg. He became known as “the father of Russian photo reporting.”

In 1886, he received from the Ministry of Internal Affairs “permission to carry out all kinds of photographic work outside his home, such as: on the streets, apartments and in the vicinity of St. Petersburg.” In 1897, Karl Bulla’s photographs began to be published in the popular magazine “Niva”. Since that time, his name became known throughout the Russian Empire.

In total, his legacy is about 230 thousand photographs of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Tsarskoselsky (Vitebsky) railway station in St. Petersburg.

Monument to Empress Catherine II.

Nevsky Prospect – the main street of St. Petersburg.

Dvortsovyy (Palace) Bridge.

Winter Palace.

Celebration of the 200th anniversary of St. Petersburg (1903).

Flood. Kryukov Canal (1903).

Petersburg Athletic Society (1905).

Collapse of the Egyptian Bridge (February 2, 1905).

Gymnastic Society “Polish Falcon” (1907).

Leo Tolstoy – one of the greatest writers of all time (1908).

Launching the battleship “Pobeda” from the slipway of the Baltic Shipyard (1911).

The dining room for the poor (1911).

Academician Vladimir Bekhterev – a neurologist and the father of objective psychology (1912).

Leonid Andreev with his wife Anna (1912). He was a prominent Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer, the father of Expressionism in Russian literature.

Feodor Chaliapin – a Russian singer, who had a great influence on the world of opera (1913).

Mathilde Kschessinska – a famous Russian ballet dancer and teacher of Polish origin (1916).

A group of Old Believers choir members (1917).

The group portrait of members of the cyclist society.

Cossack of the Cossack regiment.

Grigory Rasputin with officers.

Alexander Kerensky with assistants – Minister-Chairman of the Provisional Government between the February and October revolutions (1917).

This photo was made by Viktor Bulla, Karl Bulla’s son, from a rooftop near his photo studio. Moments after demonstrators were machine-gunned in the summer of 1917.