PHOTOGRAPHERS from Russia

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Russian Photographers of all time. This list of famous Russian Photographers is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

1. Alexander Rodchenko (1891 - 1956)

With an HPI of 64.91, Alexander Rodchenko is the most famous Russian Photographer.  His biography has been translated into 41 different languages on wikipedia.

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (Russian: Александр Михайлович Родченко; 5 December [O.S. 23 November] 1891 – 3 December 1956) was a Russian and Soviet artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova. Rodchenko was one of the most versatile constructivist and productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles—usually high above or down below—to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."

2. Roman Vishniac (1897 - 1990)

With an HPI of 49.31, Roman Vishniac is the 2nd most famous Russian Photographer.  His biography has been translated into 18 different languages.

Roman Vishniac (; Russian: Рома́н Соломо́нович Вишня́к; August 19, 1897 – January 22, 1990) was a Russian-American photographer, best known for capturing on film the culture of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. A major archive of his work was housed at the International Center of Photography until 2018, when Vishniac's daughter, Mara Vishniac Kohn, donated it to The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the University of California, Berkeley. Vishniac was a versatile photographer, an accomplished biologist, an art collector and teacher of art history. He also made significant scientific contributions to photomicroscopy and time-lapse photography. Vishniac was very interested in history, especially that of his ancestors, and strongly attached to his Jewish roots; he was a Zionist later in life. Roman Vishniac won international acclaim for his photos of shtetlach and Jewish ghettos, celebrity portraits, and microscopic biology. His book A Vanished World, published in 1983, made him famous and is one of the most detailed pictorial documentations of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Vishniac was also remembered for his humanism and respect for life, sentiments that can be seen in all aspects of his work. In 2013, Vishniac's daughter Mara (Vishniac) Kohn donated to the International Center of Photography the images and accompanying documents comprising ICP's "Roman Vishniac Rediscovered" traveling exhibition. In October 2018, Kohn donated the Vishniac archive of an estimated 30,000 items, including photo negatives, prints, documents and other memorabilia that had been housed at ICP to The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, a unit of the University of California at Berkeley's library system.