Moisei Solomonovich Nappelbaum — atelier

How does portraiture differ from other genres of photography? A portrait never tells more about its photographer than it does about its subject. It is practically impossible for the photographer to stay the master of a portrait. In the words of Moisei Nappelbaum, a portrait is a “book of the human face.” Imprints of literally everything are left on a person’s face: one’s mood, past, entire life and spiritual experiences, views on life and attitude to others. A portrait allows us to see in a single person a story that we are used to reading in books or watching in movies. But how much do people in front of a camera remain themselves? Do we see in photographs only that small bit that the photographer was able to bring out of the depth of the subject’s soul? Nappelbaum’s work is inspirational. Each portrait is a person’s story that the viewer wants to comprehend simply by studying the image. Moisei Nappelbaum’s best works were completed when he was already older than 40.

From about 1910 to 1920 he began to take portraits of the Soviet political and cultural elite, portraying the magnificence of the new state. He photographed the new leaders and commissars – Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Kalinin, Zhdanov, Stalin and Molotov – the entire Soviet establishment. In the mid-1920s he followed the government and moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where his studio on Petrovka Street became very popular.

Nappelbaum’s rather large family – his wife, four daughters and son – lived a very active cultural life. In their St. Petersburg photo studio on Nevsky Prospekt, the daughters Ida, who was already a successful photographer, and Frederika, a poet, held literary “Mondays” that became popular around town. They were attended by Gumilev, Pasternak, Esenin, Blok, Mandelshtam and Akhmatova. Eventually Moisei Nappelbaum’s circle of friends included almost all the cultural elite of Russia’s two capitals.

Critics traditionally note that Nappelbaum’s portraits are full of internal drama, a typical aspect of 19th-century Russian culture. He worked as a sincere portrait artist, employing the cold affectation of art deco or the magnificence of neoclassicism, combining the theatrical and the monumental with elegance – and without even a hint of social realism. Of the numerous Nappelbaum works that survive to this day, those that are still being reproduced are understandably those that feature famous people. Today, upon looking at these faces and knowing already a lot about the people in front of Nappelbaum’s lens, many believe that the photographer already had a sense of what fate beheld his subjects and introduced that into his portraits. Such circumstances give his work a kind of mystical if not prophetic significance.

This exhibition, “Atelier” divides the photographer’s works into various sections:“Nappelbaum and Family,” “Science,” “Art,” “Theater and Cinema,” “Music,”“Literature,” “Politics” and “From Craft to Art.” Many of the photos demonstrate the photographer’s innovations and experiments, others are unattributed, and a portion were actually made by his daughters. All the photos presented at the exhibition testify that it was completely unimportant who was in front of Nappelbaum’s lens; he had knack for reading a person. He showed mercy neither to himself nor the heroes of his works while pursuing a truth that would be an authentic embodiment of the subject’s identity. He understood the secrets of his art, of course. But, nonetheless, he understood people just as much.