At the Hermitage
July 5, 2025 Russia Photography Modernism Boris Ignatovich Socialist Realism
Boris Ignatovich, At the Hermitage, 1930
I’ve seen his photo several times before, without ever knowing who took it, where they took it, and what it was about. What always struck me about it was how strange it looked: Though clearly from the past, it had the retro-futuristic qualities of a Blade Runner still—thanks to its contrast between the wide expanse in the distance and what looks like the foot of an enormous statue in the foreground.
By pure chance I found the photo again and learned that it’s a photo taken in 1930 by the Russian photographer Boris Ignatovich. It shows the entrance of the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, and sadly there is no sky-high statue there: Instead, there are several atlas statues lining the front door of the museum, owning to an ancient tradition of “decorating palaces and profitable houses”.
The statues are certainly big, but not as huge as they seem on the photo—Ignatovich must have composed the image by standing close to one of the feet and using a high aperture to merge foreground and background. Alamy even has a stock photo that looks like it shows the exact location.
An article from AnOther magazine from 2015 provides some more details:
With its surreal composition, Ignatovich’s photo foregrounds the foot of one of the immense statues of Atlas, who holds the Hermitage on his shoulders, with a view out onto the museum’s plaza. This style of photography was typical of Ignatovich’s work; he was part of October, the left-wing collective of artists, architects, film directors and photographers, whose motto was “new times demand new forms.”
By the late 30s, Ignatovich and his fellow photographers moved further towards strict social realism, specifically photography that illustrated communist ideals. (…) The photographer would go on to photograph the front during the war, and continued to work on landscape and portraiture until his death in 1976, but it is his early shots of the new Soviet ideal that are now most associated with him.
The paradox of Socialist realism, of course, is that it isn’t real but instead shows a prescribed view of reality. The subjects promote the political system and its supposedly unstoppable progress. All that meant turning a blind eye to the dark sides of Socialism, making it what I’ve previously called it an “ideological straightjacket”.
Somehow, the irony of labeling it “realism” never previously occurred to me.
Perhaps that’s what makes At the Hermitage so extraordinary: It stems from a time before the aesthetic had truly been defined, when the artists got to be more experimental in style and almost grandiose in their ambitions. There’s an unreal quality to this images, and even if the photographer is tricking us through his use of perspective, it never feels fake—just clever.