At the same time it can be the most deceiving thing ever. “Photography is a wonderful mechanism for taking a look at these things because it’s such a great eyewitness. “It’s too easy to make assumptions, to just accept what seems to be the passed around version of reality,” said Leah Bendavid-Val, the exhibition’s curator. Moving forward, it shows the development of documentary realism in the 1960s and 1970s, a less ideology-driven portrayal of the realities of Siberian life, and then more recent, post-realist views of the region. It continues into the 1930s, when socialist realism presented propagandist, idealistic views of happy workers developing the wild Siberian landscape. It begins before the Russian revolution, a time when the first photographers sought to capture the traditional peoples of Siberia and their lifestyles. At the same time, it traces the history of Russian photography, whose various stages have presented Siberia in greatly different ways over the years. Reviews arent verified, but Google checks for and removes fake content. It covers more than 150 years of Siberian history, from the 1860s to 2011. Prestel, 2015 - Documentary photography - 251 pages. The 180 black-and-white images beautifully reproduced in this volume mainly range within this period (the latest is a self-portrait at Tolstoy’s grave from 1912).While Western photographers have emphasized Siberia’s emptiness, the Russian photographers whose work populates the exhibition, much of which has never been shown in the West before, captures the region from a multitude of perspectives.

Though she wasn’t formally trained in photography, Sophia took up the practice with an amateur’s zeal, producing about one thousand pictures, most between 18. Photography, however, offered Sophia the chance to pursue an interest that was solely hers. Such is the undercurrent that runs throughout this examination of Sophia’s words and images: though she proved herself an able manager of estate and family matters and an industrious assistant in Tolstoy’s literary endeavours, her life was, at almost every turn, subject to his.

One wonders, then, to what degree Sophia’s life can be separated from her husband’s.

Much of Bendavid-Val’s book, in fact, reads like a primer on Lev Tolstoy’s activities, his moods, and ambitions. On one hand, she is mistress of her domain, a commanding and elegant matron yet she stands at a distance, beneath a towering canopy of trees, which makes her appear diminutive and slightly indistinct, a subject secondary to her surroundings. The self-portrait with which Leah Bendavid-Val opens her introduction to Song Without Words: The Photographs and Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy presents the photographer as two women.

Leah bendavid val