"A Photograph That Has Become a Work of Art"

Stories of Iconic Lenin Photos #4

From the Soviet Sputnik Magazine in 1969, the fourth and last in a series of looks at the background of several famous, iconic photographs of Lenin.

Text:

An album produced by the Art Publishers and entitled Lenin in Photographs is thought to be the first large collection of pictures taken of the leader of the October Revolution. In it Leonid Volkov-Lannit has brought together many obscure facts. These 130 photographs recall the events in the Smolny headquarters of the revolution in Petrograd (now Leningrad). The book also tells the story of the first Soviet photographers and cameramen who photographed Lenin in those epic days.

Soviet journalist Boris Galin, 1969:

One chapter entitled "A Photograph That Has Become a Work of Art" tells of Pavel Zhukov and the portrait he took of Lenin in July 1920. Zhukov was educated at the St. Petersburg School for the Promotion of the Arts and at the Rome Academy of Arts. During the revolution he was principal photographer of the Petrograd military district and later he presented the Government with 16,000 negatives, including this portrait of Lenin. On the day he was invited to take the photograph he had only a few plates left. Looking for a darkroom in which to reload, Zhukov rushed up a stairway and climbed into a big firewood box. He reloaded four plates and then went to see Lenin. The photographing took about 90 seconds. Lenin later carefully scrutinised the pictures and said they were "the first pictures in which I look like myself".