Moisey Nappelbaum – artist or photographer?

On December 26 (14), 1869, in Minsk, Moisey Nappelbaum, a master of photo portraiture, was born. At the age of 14, he began working at the Boretti photo studio as an apprentice copier, then worked as a retoucher, and finally, after three years, became a photographer. Leaving Minsk in 1888, he worked as a photographer in Kozlov, Warsaw, Vilnius, Odessa, Yevpatoria, New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. He mainly worked abroad because, due to the restrictions of the Pale of Settlement, he could not work in central Russia. In 1895, he opened his own photo studio in Minsk.

In 1910, Moisey and his wife Rozalia converted to Orthodoxy and received permission to move to Saint Petersburg. After relocating, he collaborated with the magazine "Sun of Russia," creating portraits of famous figures in the arts. In 1912, he opened his own photo salon on Nevsky Prospect. On the sixth floor of house number 72 was the apartment where the Nappelbaum family lived in six rooms, and three rooms were occupied by the studio. At this time, Nappelbaum’s fame grew as an outstanding master of photo portraiture. He managed to elevate the craft of photography to the level of art. He rejected the then-standard practice of shooting with three light sources and preferred to shoot with just one source, achieving the famous "Rembrandt lighting" known from the history of painting. People in his works were usually photographed without additional accessories or background objects. The artistic image was created through the composition of the frame and lighting. Nappelbaum applied painterly brushes for negative retouching during development ("Nappelbaum retouch").

Sometimes Nappelbaum worked in a rare printing technique called gum printing. According to his description, "the paper is coated with gum arabic mixed with printing ink. Then it is dried and sensitized with a special solution. After that, the paper is dried again and printed contact-wise directly from the negative, without enlargement. Then the print is washed with hot water and wood shavings. The stream of hot water with shavings removes the ink in the white areas that did not print due to the opacity of the negative; the transparent areas of the negative remain dark, and the light spots give the full illusion of an engraving or etching." As a result, the photo portrait resembles a drawing made by hand with charcoal or sanguine. Each of his photographic works is unique. For Nappelbaum, the most important thing was to convey the character of the subject, to show their inner "self," without using banal techniques. For example, he allowed himself to leave half of the subject’s face in shadow while sharply highlighting the eyes. Nappelbaum considered Rembrandt his spiritual inspiration, who, according to him, more than any other artist, brilliantly worked with chiaroscuro. "Our life continuously enriches, renews, and moves forward. And photographic art must develop, spiritually mature, or else it will wither, acquire a frozen form, and lose everything so hard-earned. To prevent this, it is necessary to learn not only the technique of photography, the laws of visual art, composition, and lighting — one must study life, people, human faces, and characters in their movement. One must learn to creatively comprehend the subject," M. S. Nappelbaum from the book "From Craft to Art."

In the early 1920s, in the literary circles of Petrograd, the "Mondays at the Nappelbaums" were well known — evenings organized by Moisey Nappelbaum’s elder daughters, Ida and Frederika. Attendees included Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Yuri Tynyanov, Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilev, and Nikolai Tikhonov. Boris Pasternak came from Moscow. Nappelbaum even published one issue of the literary almanac "City." Ida and Frederika were students of Nikolai Gumilev in the poetry studio of the House of Arts. The poetry circle "The Sounding Shell" gathered both there and directly in the photo studio. Many portraits made by Moisey Nappelbaum during this time are unique valuable historical documents.

Nappelbaum was, in every sense, a self-made man. It often happens that people later idealize their biography, constructing their "path in art" as a consistent chain of achievements and victories, formed solely thanks to their indomitable creative drive. Nappelbaum honestly admits in his book "From Craft to Art" that his wanderings around the world, the very long journey from provincial, small-town Minsk to Petersburg (across all of Russia and even America) were connected not only with the desire for education, mastering the craft, and creativity, but above all — with the search for income. When did the boy retoucher from the Jewish quarter feel that he wanted to be more than a craftsman? The transition to a different qualitative level happened somewhere in the mid-1910s, when, apparently, he managed to achieve relative financial independence. At that time, he gradually moved his large family from Minsk to the capital and in 1916 acquired the luxurious Lezhonov photo studio in the attic of the house on Nevsky, 72. He began experimenting with new artistic techniques (for example, gum arabic). In the then-current debate about whether photography is art, he took the artist’s position and defended it until the end of his days.

After the revolution, in 1919, he moved to Moscow, where he opened the first state photo studio at the VTsIK in the Metropol Hotel building. He also opened a studio at the corner of Petrovka and Kuznetsky Most, while retaining the photo studio in Petrograd. In the same year, by order of Lunacharsky, the first reporting photo exhibition of Nappelbaum was held in the Anichkov Palace, marking the recognition of the photographer on par with painters.

In January 1918, he made an excellent portrait of Lenin — one of the best in photographic Leniniana. The photographer could not "catch" the light: the day was overcast. But at one moment the sun came out — and everything came together. The leader, approving the portrait for printing, signed under the photo: "Many thanks to Comrade Nappelbaum. Lenin."

In those same years, he made a series of portraits of the leaders of Soviet Russia. Among them, especially successful are those of Dzerzhinsky, Vaclav Vorovsky, Lunacharsky, and others. Important documents on the history of domestic theater are photographs of actors in theatrical costumes, which Moisey Nappelbaum repeatedly made. Often, actors in the photos reproduce a scene from a play. Among such works is the portrait of Shalyapin as Mephistopheles. Nappelbaum’s portrait of Blok was exhibited among icons on the iconostasis of the church, whose rector was the founder of the Living Church, Metropolitan Alexander Vvedensky.

After the suicide of Sergei Yesenin, Nappelbaum was invited to the Angleterre Hotel to photograph the poet. This event led to the emergence of a conspiracy theory today about Nappelbaum’s involvement in a plot to kill Yesenin.

In the early 1930s, Nappelbaum was deprived of voting rights and, as a disenfranchised person, was subject to expulsion from Moscow. With great difficulty, he managed to have this status revoked and found work in a photo studio serving tourist amateur photographers.

In 1954, about 4,000 negatives from M. S. Nappelbaum’s personal archive were transferred to the Central State Archive of Cinema, Photo, and Phonographic Documents of the USSR for permanent storage.

Moisey Nappelbaum died in Moscow on June 13, 1958.

Sources:

https://www.dw.com/ru/ленин-ахматова-ростропович-фотохроника-советской-эпохи/a-16371756

https://polit.ru/news/2014/12/26/nappelbaum/

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Наппельбаум,_Моисей_Соломонович