Maksim Petrovich Dmitriev (August 21, 1858 – October 15, 1948) was a Nizhny Novgorod photographer whose albums mark the starting point of Russian journalistic photo reportage.[1][2] For more than forty years he kept a studio on Osypnaya Street (today Piskunova Street), photographed the Volga from its source to its mouth, and printed in his own phototype shop an album about the famine of 1891–1892. The building where his pavilion stood now houses the Russian Museum of Photography.[3]
A Pupil of Nastyukov and Karelin
Dmitriev was born on August 21, 1858, in the village of Povalishino in Kirsanov Uyezd, Tambov Governorate, and spent his childhood in Yegoryevsk Uyezd, Ryazan Governorate, where he graduated from a parish school.[1] At the age of fourteen he found himself in Moscow and became an apprentice to the photographer Mikhail Nastyukov, a court photographer; on Sundays he attended drawing classes at the Stroganov School, where they studied composition, perspective, light, and shadow.[1][4] He started out washing glass for photographic plates, then went on to mounting prints and retouching.[1]
In 1874 his employer took the apprentice with him to Nizhny Novgorod: Nastyukov had a pavilion at the Nizhny Novgorod Yarmarka. There Dmitriev met Andrey Osipovich Karelin, whose studio was by then known throughout Europe.[1][2] Both Nizhny Novgorod masters came out of the same school: Karelin, too, had passed through Nastyukov's workshop.[4]
In 1877 Dmitriev moved to Nizhny for good and began as a retoucher in Leibovsky's studio. He started working for Karelin in the late 1870s or early 1880s: by some accounts he came to him as a laboratory assistant in 1879, by others he accepted an invitation to work in the photo salon in 1882.[1][2] His teacher did not hide the craft from him; in those same years Dmitriev left to work in Oryol and Moscow, and returned to Nizhny in the mid-1880s.[1][2]
The Photography Studio on Osypnaya
Dmitriev opened his own photography studio in 1886 and called it "M. Dmitriev's New Photography."[2] The house at 9 Osypnaya was arranged as a single production facility: the first floor held the phototype (collotype) printing shop, the second was occupied by the photo pavilion, built to Karelin's design — to let in more light, the pavilion's street-facing wall was made entirely of glass — and on the third floor the photographer's family lived.[3] The studio operated at this location for more than forty years.[1]
Dmitriev's traveling camera has survived and is held in a museum collection: a universal folding model designed for 45 × 55 centimeter glass negatives, made by the Moscow firm "N. K. Klyachko and D. P. Ezuchevsky." Folded, the case measures 84 × 71 × 84 centimeters — this was the load the photographer carried as he traveled around the districts of the Governorate.[5]
Recognition came in 1889, at the All-Russian Photography Exhibition in Moscow, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of photography ("light-writing"): Dmitriev displayed a stand of more than fifty works — genre scenes, portraits, landscapes, and group photographs.[1] From then on he exhibited constantly, in Russia and abroad; he received a small gold medal at the 1892 Moscow exhibition in the professional photographers' category, and a gold medal at the Paris international exhibition.[1] In 1899 he was admitted as a full member of the Russian Geographical Society, on the nomination of Pyotr Semyonov-Tyan-Shansky.[1][2]
The studio had its own street advertising: almost directly across from the house stood a wooden display case with an enormous plate-glass window, and the photographs in it were changed regularly. The walls of the entrance and of the cast-iron staircase inside the house itself were also hung with photographs of city life.[3]
Almost directly across from this house stood a special wooden display case with an enormous plate-glass window. This display case was very popular, and onlookers always crowded around it. Here one could see photographs of A. M. Gorky with F. I. Chaliapin, V. G. Korolenko, and P. I. Melnikov-Pechersky.
The Volga Collection
In 1894 Dmitriev began a project that took him about ten years and nearly all the money he earned: he photographed the Volga from its source to its mouth, stopping every eight versts.[2] He traveled on a specially equipped steamboat and photographed nature, monasteries, towns, and villages — Gorodets, Tver, Rybinsk, Kazan, Simbirsk, Samara, Saratov, Astrakhan — and his contemporaries called this suite the "Volga Collection."[2][6]
The photography historian Elena Barkhatova ranks the large-format prints of the suite among the finest examples of Russian art photography: panoramas of epic sweep, taken by a man for whom the Volga was his native river.[6] His Volga views spread across the country in albums and postcards in enormous print runs, and the photographs themselves were used in scholarly publications.[1][6]
Volga work also drew Dmitriev deep into the governorate: he photographed the fading frescoes of the Makaryev Monastery, Sarov, Diveevo, and Ponetayevka.[2]
"The Year of Crop Failure"
Dmitriev photographed the famine of 1891–1892 not as a chronicle of disaster but as an indictment. In 1893 he published, in his own phototype printing, the album "The Crop Failure of 1891–1892 in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate"; with it, the photojournalistic report begins in Russia.[1][2] For this work the photographer, with his heavy camera, traveled through nearly all the uezds of the governorate.[2]
The individual plates of the series are large albumen prints measuring about 37 × 53 centimeters. One of them, "Distribution of Charitable Bread to Peasants in the Supernumerary Town of Pochinki, Lukoyanov Uezd," is held at the National Library of Russia and is open for reading in its electronic library; another well-known plate is "A People's Canteen in the Village of Chernovskoye, Sergach Uezd," 1892.[7][6]
Barkhatova observes that, for all their ethnographic accuracy, the photographs win above all through their credibility: Dmitriev built complex multi-figure compositions that echo the Peredvizhniki paintings of the people's misfortune.[6]
The 1896 Exhibition and Reportage Photography
For the XVI All-Russian Trade, Industrial, and Art Exhibition of 1896 in Nizhny Novgorod, a separate photographic pavilion was built for Dmitriev, where his Volga Region cycle was shown; the pavilion was a success with the public.[2] He photographed the entire exhibition and issued an album of it, definitively establishing his reputation as a photojournalist.[1]
Photographing events became a trade of its own for him. Dmitriev photographed all of Nicholas II's visits to Nizhny Novgorod, ceremonies and foundation-layings, and the 1893 wreck of a convoy of vessels at the Siberian Pier.[2][6] He also documented everyday life in the city — from factory prayer services to sessions of the City Duma.
Vagrants and the Flophouse
What set Dmitriev's pictures apart from Karelin's views was that his streets and squares always have people in them: peasants, porters, pilgrims, the denizens of the Lower Bazaar. He photographed "types" — portraits of those whom photography of the time did not notice.[2]
The lodgers of Nikolay Bugrov's flophouse on Rozhdestvenskaya Street, whom the city called the "golden company," became the prototypes for the characters of Gorky's play The Lower Depths.[2] These shots — "Nizhny Novgorod Vagrants," a fistfight outside the flophouse, a flophouse barracks at the Siberian Piers — remain to this day the principal visual testimony to the lower depths of Nizhny Novgorod at the turn of the century.
Series
Dmitriev worked in cycles: a subject would be photographed in succession over the years and would come together as an album or a set of postcards.
| Series | Years | Known details |
|---|---|---|
| "The Failed Harvest of 1891–1892 in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate" | 1891–1893 | An album of phototypes printed in his own workshop; individual sheets are albumen prints approximately 37 × 53 cm; originals held at the Russian National Library[1][7] |
| Volga Collection | from 1894, approximately ten years | Photography of the Volga from source to mouth at intervals of every eight versts, taken from a steamboat; large-format sheets[2][6] |
| "Zavolzhye Craftsmen" | 1897 | Crafts of Zavolzhye; the sheet "Spoon-makers of Semyonov Uezd at Work" is an albumen print from the collection of the Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve[4] |
| Yarmarka | 1880s – 1910s | The Russian Museum of Photography holds 28 original positives from the series, measuring 18 × 24 cm[5] |
| Exhibition of 1896 | 1896 | Photography of all sections and pavilions; a separate album[1][2] |
| Workers and Peasants of the Governorate | 1890s – 1900s | Series including "Volga Barge Haulers," "Lukoyanov Peasants," and workers from Sormovo, Vyksa, and Kulebaki[2] |
| Portraits | 1880s – 1910s | Gorky, Shalyapin, Korolenko, Mendeleev, Komissarzhevskaya, Melnikov-Pechersky[1][3] |
What became of the archive
In 1929 the house on Osypnaya Street was nationalized, and a contract was drawn up with Dmitriev: the former owner was taken on as a studio photographer in his own workshop.[2] He remained artistic director of the photography studio until 1940.[1] In 1927 the city marked the fiftieth anniversary of his creative work.[1]
In 1933 a large collection of negatives was seized on the orders of Monakhov, chairman of the regional archival bureau; some of what was taken later went missing.[2] What survived was dispersed among museum and archival collections — from the Russian Museum of Photography and the Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve to the Russian National Library.[5][6][4]
Maxim Petrovich died on 15 October 1948, at the age of ninety, and was buried at the city cemetery on Pushkina Street; the grave has been preserved.[1]
Legacy and where to look
On 8 August 1993, a cast memorial plaque by O. Lisenkov was installed on the building at 9 Piskunova Street, reading: "In this house in 1886–1940 lived and worked the outstanding master of artistic photography and founder of Russian photojournalism Maxim Petrovich Dmitriev."[1] That same year, 1993, a museum opened in the building — the present-day Russian Museum of Photography, dedicated to Karelin and Dmitriev.[3]
The largest collection of Dmitriev's works is held there as well: 1,551 storage units, including glass negatives, photographs, phototypes, postcards, and documents from his personal archive.[5] Individual sheets from "The Year of Crop Failure" and the Volga albums are held by the Russian National Library.[6][7] In the winter of 2025–2026, ROSFOTO in Saint Petersburg exhibited more than three hundred original works by Karelin and Dmitriev from the collection of the Nizhny Novgorod Museum-Reserve.[4]
At the museum itself, Dmitriev's biography is now told not only through display cases: together with the Nizhny Novgorod Youth Theatre, it stages the performance-tour "Visiting Dmitriev," in which spectators print views of Nizhny Novgorod from glass negatives in the museum's photo lab.[8]
Sources
- opentextnn.ru — Izvekov B. S., Kessel A. V. Memorial Plaques of Nizhny Novgorod: Dmitriev M. P. (1858–1948). Piskunova Street, 9 — a directory of memorial plaques, "Otkryty Tekst" (archive)
- fotomuseum.nnov.ru — Russian Museum of Photography. A Tour of the Museum — an expository essay on the work of M. P. Dmitriev and the route of his Volga photography (archive)
- fotomuseum.nnov.ru — Russian Museum of Photography. About the Museum — the building on Osypnaya Street, Karelin's photo pavilion, the display case, and F. Bogorodsky's recollections (archive)
- rosphoto.org — Andrey Karelin and Maxim Dmitriev — masters of light-painting from Nizhny Novgorod — a ROSPHOTO exhibition, 12 December 2025–15 February 2026 (archive)
- fotomuseum.nnov.ru — Russian Museum of Photography. Collections — composition of the holdings: 1,551 storage units by Dmitriev, the "Yarmarka" series, field camera
- expositions.nlr.ru — Barkhatova E. V. Along the Banks of the Great Volga: Rare Photographs by Leading Russian Masters of the Second Half of the 19th Century — a virtual exhibition of the Russian National Library (archive)
- rusneb.ru — [The Crop Failure Year of 1891–92 in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate]. Distribution of charitable grain to peasants in the minor town of Pochinki, Lukoyanov Uyezd. 1892
- fotomuseum.nnov.ru — the theatrical tour "Visiting Dmitriev" and the exhibition "Nizhny Through the Lens" (archive)