A living archive of memory
The Smodor House Digital Archive
Archives of unknown photographers from the Kostroma region — the visual memory and everyday life of villages through the 20th century.
Travel through the decades
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Праздник села
Праздник на селе всегда был событием, вырывающим людей из череды трудовых будней, во многих сёлах и деревнях Костромской области традиция их отмечания сохраняется и сегодня. Часто именно в этих праздниках раскрывается идентичность места, таланты местных жителей, особенности их повседневной жизни, показаны места, где все собираются. В этой подборке представлены кадры фотографа Владимира Варновского, который фиксировал праздники в родном Парфеньевском районе.
20 photos
Памятники архитектуры
Наш проект тесно связан с проблемой охраны памятников культурного наследия, их восстановлением и консервацией. На территории некогда богатейшей Костромской области было воздвигнуто огромное число уникальных храмов и усадеб, сильно пострадавших или утраченных в XX и XXI веке. Эдуард Репин - один из наших фотографов - был активным участником сохранения наследия, организатором костромского отделения ВООПИКа, запечатлел множество памятников архитектуры, осознавая их ценность и безвременность утраты.
14 photos
Mikhail Smodor
Mikhail Smodor was the photographic chronicler of Galich, capturing the town and its people for three decades. After seven years of apprenticeship under the Warsaw master Yakov Tiraspolsky, he opened his own studio in Galich. His photographs — architecture and landscapes, the fishermen of the Rybnaya Sloboda quarter, festivals and everyday scenes — were shown at a crafts and industry exhibition and circulated as postcards. In 1935, denounced on false charges, Smodor was sent to the Gulag to build the Moscow–Volga canal; released two years later with his health broken, he died in 1942, leaving behind a rich photographic chronicle of Galich in the first third of the twentieth century.
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Vladimir Rusin
Vladimir Ivanovich Rusin was a photographer from Sudislavl who captured the life of a small district town in the 1920s–1940s. His pictures preserved the look of pre-revolutionary and early Soviet Sudislavl: town streets, festivals, work, portraits of residents and everyday life on the eve of the Second World War. Working without a studio of his own, Rusin photographed local notables and ordinary townspeople alike, leaving a unique visual chronicle of his time. Thanks to the surviving archive of glass negatives, we can still see a world that was soon to be changed irrevocably by the war.
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Alexander Dudin
Alexander Filaretovich Dudin was a village photographer and schoolteacher from Sovega, a remote cluster of villages in the Kostroma region. While teaching physics and drawing, he spent many years documenting the everyday life of the surrounding villages: school celebrations, weddings, subbotniks, family events, work and daily routines. After his death the archive was believed lost, until part of the negatives was found by chance in an abandoned house in 2021. These films preserved a unique visual record of northern Russian village life in the 1960s–1980s and brought back the memory of people whose stories might otherwise have been forgotten forever.
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Pyotr Maryin
Pyotr Grigoryevich Maryin was a village photographer from Spas in the Vokhma district of the Kostroma region. After returning from army service he devoted himself to photography: he shot the everyday life of the village and family occasions, and for many years ran a home studio making ID portraits for the residents of the surrounding villages. His surviving darkroom and the negatives found there became a unique record of life in the Russian countryside in the second half of the twentieth century. The discovery and preservation of this archive brought back hundreds of faces and stories of the people who made up the daily life of a small rural community.
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Vladimir Krasnukhin
Vladimir Sergeyevich Krasnukhin (1911–1941) was an amateur photographer from the village of Kuzhbal in the Ney district, grandson of the priest Pavel Krasnukhin. A chemical engineer by training, he photographed on glass plates the peaceful life of his large family — sisters and nephews, the family home and its apple orchard in Kuzhbal. In the summer of 1941, having finished his degree in besieged Leningrad, he volunteered for a home-defence battalion and died in the blockaded city that December. His negatives, found in a chest in the abandoned family house, preserved the faces of a family whose letters and diaries became a chronicle of Russia’s twentieth century.
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Andrew Nosov
Andrei Nosov is an amateur photographer from Galich, a hereditary fisherman from the Rybnaya Sloboda quarter. He began taking pictures at the age of seven with a Zorki camera inherited from his father: friends and family, subbotniks and May Day parades, weddings, stag parties and fishing on Lake Galich — the everyday life of a provincial town in the 1980s and early 1990s. Fifty carefully labelled rolls of Svema film lay for twenty years with the Galich local historian Nikolai Sotnikov, until photographer Ekaterina Solovyova digitised them — bringing the life of the Rybnaya Sloboda and its people back from oblivion.
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