Photo album "The Bulla’s Dynasty: Karl, Alexander, Victor, Yuri" was sent to the Presidential Library for the digitization

This is not the first photo album about the famous photographer who will enrich the electronic fund of the Presidential Library - the edition "The First Photographer of Russia Karl Bulla" has already been digitized and is available on the portal.

The famous photo correspondent was able to bring up no less famous masters, the successors of the family business. When you leaf through albums with photos of Karl Bulla, his sons and grandson, it seems that this talented family has recorded all the important events that occurred in Russia in the late XIX and early XX centuries, during the Revolution of 1917, the first decades of Soviet power.

In February 1899, Karl Bulla became a special photographer for the patronage of the Empress Maria Feodorovna of the deaf-mute children. In a letter of October 3, 1906, the head of this committee gives a review about Bulla: "For more than 5 years he has been issuing at his own expense all the assignments given to him by the guardianship". Since August 1904, Karl Bulla was allowed to photograph "celebrations in the highest presence". Now at official events - royal receptions, meetings with foreign sovereigns, military reviews, opening ceremonies - Karl Karlovich worked as a photo reporter, and Alexander and Viktor - as cameramen. At the celebrations in honor of the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov in Moscow and Kostroma, Karl Karlovich traveled with Victor. Ceremonial portraits presented at the album of Emperor Nicholas II and Tsarevich Alexei, other members of the crowned family, are widely known.

The gallery of photographs about the life of the northern capital was decorated with photographs of the celebration of the centenary of the Kazan Cathedral. The photographer filmed almost all the events that took place in the city: holidays, fires and floods, as well as everyday life, work of lanterns…

Almost two years Karl Karlovich was preparing the shooting of Leo Tolstoy and his family in Yasnaya Polyana. It was held in 1908, and now the whole world has the opportunity to see Count Tolstoy in the bosom of nature, playing chess, in a circle of relatives. A kind of afterword to the Yasnaya Polyana photo shooting was a photograph of Karl Bulla in 1910 in Penates, where Ilya Repin and Kornei Chukovsky read in the newspaper the news of Tolstoy's death. Victor Bulla on November 9, 1910 filmed 140 meters of the film "The Funeral of Leo Tolstoy".

Bulla’s brothers learned a lot from their father, they passed an internship in Germany. They were constantly in the thick of the events of the great and terrible era that fell to their lot, equally owning both the camera and the cinema camera. The younger Bulla, Victor, became famous as a military photojournalist during the Russo-Japanese War; Senior, Alexander, filmed the First World War. Both were awarded medals for bravery at the front, and later showed courage as photographers of the revolutionary 1917.

The album features a memo cover of the magazine “Ogonyok” with a portrait of Lenin by Victor Bulla and the continuation of his 1920 Leninist: a photograph “Lenin and Gorky” and a famous photo by Ilyich hastily writing on the steps of the stage the theses of the performance – “V. I. Lenin among the delegates of the Ninth Congress of the RCP (B)".

The family path was chosen by the Victor’s son Yuri, who often placed his pictures in the newspaper “Leninskie Iskry”. The album includes his portrait, executed by the father: a beautiful young open face. He went to war in the autumn of 1941. He was missing, subsequent requests were not given any information ...

The album ends with a picture “Nevsky Prospekt, 54”, made by the founder of the dynasty, who opened a photo salon at that time, very fashionable then. And quite near, around the corner, on Malaya Sadovaya there is a bronze statue of this "short, smart man in a bowler hat ... with a huge camera, about the size of a big barrel organ, wrapped around his neck" - a unique master of the photo-lithography of the Northern capital.

It is planned that a large-scale project of photographic heritage of the Bulla’s dynasty will be presented in Germany. The Presidential Library and the German-Russian Institute of Culture in Dresden agreed on this, as it was announced at the round table "Photo view on Russia: From the Origins to Our Days" in November 2017.