Monument to the Photographer

On Malaya Sadovaya Street, one of the most compact pedestrian spaces in St Petersburg's historic centre, stands a bronze figure of an early twentieth-century photographer — wearing a bowler hat and a tie, an open umbrella held over his head. Beside him, an old-fashioned camera is mounted on a tripod, and an English bulldog sits at his feet. The sculpture does not reproduce the likeness of any specific individual but brings together the typical features of a capital-city master of photography of that era.

The site for the monument was not chosen by chance: from the early twentieth century until the 1930s, house No. 3 on Malaya Sadovaya housed the photographic studio of the Bulla dynasty — the largest in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. It is for this reason that the prototype for the bronze figure is thought to be Karl Karlovich Bulla, whose name entered history together with the title "father of Russian photojournalism". The monument was installed on 25 January 2001, designed by the architect Larisa Domracheva and the sculptor B. A. Petrov.

The figure stands two and a half metres tall and is made of bronze. The photographer is captured at the moment just before taking a shot: with his left hand he holds the umbrella that shields his equipment from the weather, while his pose conveys a professional's concentration before the exposure. The sculptors included the tripod-mounted camera and the crouching bulldog as recognisable details of early twentieth-century photographic life — dogs of this kind often lived at capital-city studios.

Karl Bulla opened his own photographic studio in St Petersburg in 1875, and in 1886 obtained permission from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to shoot outdoors — on the streets, in private apartments, and in the surroundings of the capital — a rare privilege for the time. Thanks to this permission, an extensive archive of street and reportage photographs of the city took shape, including views of buildings, some of which were later lost and survive only in these photographs. During the siege of Leningrad, photo display cases with weekly updated news were set up on Malaya Sadovaya, sustaining residents with living evidence of events.

Today the monument is one of the city's most recognisable small-scale sculptures and part of an ensemble of urban folklore that has taken shape on Malaya Sadovaya: a year earlier, the cat Yelisei and the cat Vasilisa — sculptures conceived by Sergei Lebedev with the participation of the same architect, Domracheva — had taken up residence on the cornices of the buildings on either side of the street. The photographer has acquired his own tradition among visitors: to have your photograph taken holding his right elbow is said to bring luck to the picture, while rubbing the little finger of his bronze hand is said to bring financial well-being.

The monument to the St Petersburg photographer is a rare example, for the city, of a sculpture dedicated not to a historical event or an outstanding individual but to an entire profession closely tied to the city's own history. It recalls a time when photography was still a craft of tripods and glass plates, and it remains an enduring part of any walking route through the city centre.