A modern complete monograph by Naum Granovsky is published by Galerie Lumière and the Still Art Foundation on the occasion of the author’s 110th birthday. Granovsky became famous as the chief architectural photographer of the USSR, whose favorite city was Moscow. The book offers a fascinating look at the changing appearance of Moscow in the 20th century: readers will find rare photographs of buildings that were once demolished or reconstructed beyond recognition, as well as Big Style architecture and Soviet modernism of the 1950s and 1980s, the time of grandiose construction of Moscow.
“The chronicler of Moscow” Naum Granovsky was called during his lifetime – he was a man who was able to capture the look of the city for more than half a century. Granovsky chose Moscow as the main subject of his photographs, he looked at it as a living person, noting all the changes that took place in it, he became one of those who told the story of the city, largely determining our attitude to this history.
The Lumiere Gallery has been working with the photographic legacy of Naum Granovsky since its founding in 2001, and since 2017 has owned the collection and the copyright to the author’s work. Today, the Gallery explores the 35,000 negatives created by the author during his 60 years of creativity. This book is the second monographic edition made by the team of the Gallery. Compared to the first edition, it covers Granovsky’s heritage much more broadly, following his chronology of photography.
The new monograph consists of seven sections dedicated to different periods of the author’s work from the 20s to the 80s. The album includes 250 works – not only the famous shots of Granovsky, which have already become classics, but also his lesser-known works that the Lumiere Gallery managed to find during the last 5 years of working with the master’s negatives.
The publishing program was supported by the Still Art Cultural Foundation. Naum Granovsky’s book is the first monograph of the classic of Soviet photography to be published by the Foundation.
Introductory articles to the book’s sections were written by Natalia Grigorieva-Litvinskaya, founder of the Lumiere Gallery; Elena Karisalova, founder of the Still Art Foundation; and Elizaveta Likhacheva, art historian. The book was designed by graphic designer Evgeny Korneev, the founder of the Razdizayn bureau; he also holds prizes in graphic design, a diploma of the Russian Academy of Arts and the UNESCO diploma at the Leipzig book fair (2005), and is a professor at the Higher School of Art and Design.
The album is in two languages: Russian and English.
Number of pages 304
Circulation 1500