“Tsarskoye Selo Album” by Dmitry Goryachev presented at the Akhmatova Museum

At the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House, an employee of the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg photographer Dmitry Goryachev presented a book of photographs, essays and documents “Tsarskoye Selo Album”, reports a Rosbalt correspondent.

Dmitry Goryachev acted as the creator of the author’s book – as a photographer, author of texts and even fonts for headings. Dmitry has been photographing Tsarskoye Selo for many years – the city of Pushkin, its gardens and parks. Prefers early in the morning, so that the light falls in a special way.

“I really like to walk in Tsarskoye Selo parks in early spring,” Dmitry writes in the preface. – When the snow has already melted, and the leaves have not yet blossomed, when primroses bloom in sunny glades, when everything is transparent and clean. When the alleys, lined with long bizarre shadows, are deserted.

The first photos of the Tsarskoye Selo Album are dated 2011, and the latest photos are from 2020, during the times of quarantine and self-isolation, when the parks were closed.

The publication also uses rare archival photos and postcards from a private collection.

Dmitry Goryachev in the first chapter of the album talks about how photography developed in Tsarskoye Selo and the first photo studios worked, given that the imperial family lived in Tsarskoye Selo for a long time, and it was here that the institution of personal photographers was created: “A person with a camera became the same shadow of the first person states as a bodyguard, secretary and doctor.

And then the modern photographer travels through the Tsarskoye Selo parks – Fermsky Park, the vicinity of Lamsky Ponds, Alexander and Ekaterininsky Parks. When asked by a Rosbalt correspondent why the chapters of the album were arranged in that order, Dmitry Goryachev replied: “This is the order of my walk around Tsarskoye Selo – I get off the minibus at Fermsky Park and go to Ekaterininsky Park.”

The album contains rare archival photographs. For example, an elephant bathing in one of the Lamsky ponds, or Grigory Rasputin – the only archival photograph not from Tsarskoye Selo. Goryachev took a modern photo of the place where there was a temporary grave of the “holy elder” in Tsarskoye Selo park.

There are also color inserts in the album – a kind of counterpoint, momentary observations of the photographer: from the International Balloon Fiesta, which took place for the only time in 2007, to traces of a forgotten road near the current Expoforum.

It should be reminded that earlier in the museum-apartment of Alexander Blok (Dekabristov Street, 57) an exhibition of Tesfaye Atsbeh Negga began its work.