Colour Fragments of an Empire. Carl Elof Berggren's Photographic Lantern Slides,. 1900 — Early 1910s

The series presented at the exhibition includes over 200 unique hand-coloured photographic lantern slides with views of Moscow and other regions of the Russian Empire made in the 1900s and 1910s by Carl Elof Berggrén, an officer of the Swedish General Staff.

Berggren served in the mission of the Swedish Red Cross in the Russian Empire for about 10  years. He fell in  love with the  country, learned Russian extremely well, and travelled widely, discovering and studying the  most remote areas of  the  Empire. As an amateur photographer, he made a real photo chronicle of Russian life of the early 20th century in the course of his travels. 

With the  passion of  a discoverer and the  meticulousness of  an officer, Berggren captured the  cultural, social and political codes of  the  time marked by a  decisive optimism reigning in  the Empire and the  gradually emerging dynamism of  the  new century. The  colours added by the photographer to his lantern slides brought these purely documentary images into the field of art, immortalizing the subjects of his camera. The chorus of unexpected voices, the host of routine sounds, the multitude of startling camera angles, the heterogeneity of the backgrounds, the transparency of colours, the harshness of the bitter cold, the density of snow, the texture of fabric, the roughness of a soldier’s boot, the sound of hooves on the pavement of Red Square: these and other phenomena are meticulously studied, recreated, reinterpreted and recodified by the photographer to bring them across to the viewer. 

World War I, Revolution, the fall of the Russian Empire, Civil War, famine and industrialization still lay ahead, and so Berggren’s camera captured only familiar sights: everyday scenes, architecture, military parades, and merchant caravans. The  photographer depicted ordinary events from unexpected angles, analysing and colouring them long before the invention of colour photography. Colour enhanced the  sensual impact of  reality and intensified the  photographer’s narrative of  his encounter with images that subsist, vanish, jump forward or back, and lead from one to another… Far from constituting a single whole, the moments of time captured by the lantern slides represent fragments of another world, other social strata, and a different epoch. 

Carl Elof Berggren expressed the spirit of his time with the skill and inspiration of an artist. He captured the atmosphere of the final years of the Russian Empire, leaving behind a unique historical chronicle of people, places and events.