Vladislav Mikosha

The time machine. Color. 1930-1970

Over the last four years the Moscow House of Photography Museum has been compiling the photographic archive of legendary photographer and cameraman Vladislav Mikosha (1909–2004), author of famous images such as the demolition of Christ the Saviour Cathedral, the rescue of the SS Chelyuskin crew, the defence of Sevastopol and the liberation of Warsaw, as well as meetings between Stalin and Mao, Khrushchev and Kennedy. For more than six decades Vladislav Mikosha was always busy with either a motion-picture or photographic camera, leaving behind a vast number of images — a testimony of troubled times: reportage from the front, shots for Ogonyok and Vokrug Sveta magazines, portraits of politicians and cultural figures. Colour made its appearance in the final stage of his career and probably represented the most complex period of his oeuvre.

Mikosha was one of the first Soviet photographers to use colour, producing a twenty-minute colour film of the Victory Parade on Red Square, extensive photographic series in colour depicting postwar Moscow and Leningrad, the Crimea and Caucasus, China (1949–1950), Indonesia (1955), Burma (1956) and Tbilisi (1951), and the full-colour stamps series issued in the 1940s to mark the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. In the postwar years colour predominated over black-and-white imagery in his work.

The Carbro colour process invented in 1869 was labour-intensive, since it involved trichrome photography and printing by means of complicated colour separation. For this reason many Soviet photographers opted to work in colour when the appropriate printing materials first appeared in 1938, although their enthusiasm quickly cooled. This was partly because the Carbro process ’partially eliminates half-tones and transitional shading’, wrote the critic V. Grishanin in an article for Soviet Photo magazine.

Mikosha was never deterred by technical difficulties or the artistic shortcomings of the Carbro process. He frequently and enthusiastically resorted to colour photography. For the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition alone he took more than a hundred shots. Of the 120 images shown at his solo exhibition in 1940, 20 were in colour. That was a remarkable number in those days. In Ogonyok magazine Yuri Prigozhin wrote: ’Colour photography is a new dimension. [...] But among the few colour photography enthusiasts that have appeared so far, V. Mikosha stands out favourably for his subtle perception of colour’ (Ogonyok No. 20, 1940).

Even after the war it was not easy for Mikosha to work in colour, whether in films or photography. At the cinema studios he literally ’never left’ the technical control department, insisting that they print copies with what seemed to the departmental controllers ’strange’ tints, fishing out from the reject bin his soft, ethereal shots using long-focus optics, with what they deemed ’insufficiently sharp middle ground’.