The Presidential Library will convert the creative legacy of the photographers of the Bulla dynasty into “pixel”

The Presidential Library's is getting ready to converting into digital format and adding to its stock creative heritage of the Bulla — Carl, Victor and Alexander — dynasty of photographers.

Karl Bulla, the founder of Russian photo-reporting, became known by thousands of images capturing the Royal family members and the life of “a womb” of the capital city of St. Petersburg — Petrograd. His sons, Victor and Alexander, continued theirs father's work. They were persecuted for political reasons. Victor's son, Yuri, had worked as a photographer as well. He was killed at the front in 1941.

The Presidential Library, amassing a documentary history of Russian statehood, along with the Historical Photography Foundation named after Karl Bulla is getting ready for converting the dynasty heritage into electronic form, assuring its maximum safekeeping and public availability. “A monumental photographic legacy of Karl Bulla and his sons — a precious layer of Russian and world photography culture, a unique chronicle of Russian history of the XIX and the XX centuries, — the President of the Foundation, Director General of Photography Studios named after Karl Bulla Valentin Elbek, who presented the project in the course of the Presidential Library roundtable entitled “The unknown photographic heritage: the question of identity and representation.”

This will be one of the first major examples of cooperation between the private Foundation and the state repository. And, according to Valentin Elbek, it is also one of the first cases when a private collection will be preserved in the digital stock of the library while all the photographs remain with the owners.

It was also announced during the meeting that launching of a remote center of access to the resources of the Presidential library is already planned in the Karl Bulla Gallery on 54 Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg. The remote electronic reading room of the Presidential library will also be open in the ROSPHOTO Gallery.

Overall the Presidential Library currently has about 8 thousand photographs. Images are included in almost every collection as a self-contained stock entry or grouped within photo albums, if sometimes not as part of a freestanding section.