A few days ago, a photo exhibition opened at the Odesa Museum of Western and Eastern Art, where I was lucky enough to visit. Here is a unique collection of photographs of an Odesa photographer who took pictures of Odesa for forty years, from 1913 to 1953.
The pictures unfolded a wide picture, telling about the life of the city, from the chamber, family filming to large-scale changes in the fate of the city and the country caught by Vikentiy Kugel's camera.
Created with an interest in the smallest details, Kugel's photographs allow you to open unprecedented pages of history, immerse yourself in the atmosphere of Odesa in the first half of the twentieth century.
For more than 60 years, a suitcase with this legacy lay untouched in the same apartment where the photographer lived, where his home darkroom was.
The Kugel Archives is a unique photographic collection that should become an important contribution to the cultural and historical heritage of the 20th century.
The author ordered photographic materials from Europe while it was possible, and therefore, earlier than other colleagues, he was able to convey movement in the photographs. A number of photographs were taken on film - Vikenty Matveyevich used it in his work with a camera instead of glass plates.
The pictures show the queues at the grocery store, a nudist beach, bird's-eye panoramas of the city. The exhibition is interesting. I looked at the photos and tried to identify some places and times of shooting. Signs in Russian mean the 30s of the last century.
Lots of abbreviations. Short-haired children - this means that they fought lice. Horses bathe in the sea. Old tram. Paving stones on the roads, lava tiles on the sidewalks. Crowds of people on the beaches. The beaches are still rocky - the shores are washed away and the sand will be poured in the mid-'60s.
Kugel was a German who came from Latvia in the early twentieth century. Therefore, he survived the occupation.
