Anatoly Trapani is one of the brightest and most mysterious figures in the history of Russian photography. Though little is known about him, and only few of his works have survived, he has left an important trace in the development of pictorialism in Russia in the first decades of XX century. His almost detective story of researching snippets of information about his life and work shows that he played an important role in the rapid development of "artistic" photography: in the propaganda of a radical European approach to artistic photography, in ideological disputes on the pages of periodicals as well as in the formation of a new type of exhibitions – "salons of artistic photography". In this lecture, the works of Trapani and artists-photographers of his circle, members of the Young Art group (Nikolai Petrov, Sergey Savrasov, Nikolai Murzin, and Alexander Ivanov-Terentiev) as well as friends and colleagues (Yuri Eremin, Alexander Grinberg, Nikolai Svishchev-Paol, Boris Pashkevich, Miron Sherling, and others) will be introduced. ), we will consider the main characteristics of pictorialism as the first purely photographic movement, the stages and specifics of its development in Russian context and the inclusion of this movement into the global context and into the general field of Silver Age culture. We will also try to trace the influence of pictorialism paradigm on the further development of artistic photography in Russia.

Igor Volkov - Graduated from the Department of History and Theory of Art at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2012. Worked in the Department of Photography at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and then at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. Since 2019 he has been a member of the Contemporary Art Department at the State Tretyakov Gallery. He is one of the curators of the exhibitions "Russian Fairy Tale. From Vasnetsov to Now" and "Thing. Space. Man" held at the New Tretyakov Gallery. He has lectured at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Lumière Brothers Center for Photography, the Litfond Auction House, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow and the State Tretyakov Gallery, as well as at the Synchro platform. Fields of research: contemporary art and tradition; mutual influence of photography and other arts; body and corporeality in plastic arts; leitmotifs and symbols of modernity in the art of the XXth century.