Exhibition of photographs by Nikolai Drachinsky "Moscow Multicontours"

A man of a unique biography, Nikolai Ivanovich Drachinsky made a truly outstanding contribution to the development of domestic photography. The focus of the exhibition at the Museum of Moscow is the legacy of his artistic and technological experiments with film and paper from the mid-1970s.

Multicontour - this is the name of the technique he created for obtaining a multilayer color photographic image. Thanks to her, Drachinsky long before the advent of digital photo editors received the effects that are widely used today by photo artists and designers. Colored "multi-contours" naturally turned out to be involved in the Moscow underground culture of the 1970s. They combined festivity of flowers, carnival, contrary to gray weekdays, with ironic collages of plots in which the ballerina flies over the pediment of the Bolshoi Theater, and all Moscow architectural monuments are lined up in a round dance. Moscow was the main topic of photographic experiments and the favorite city of Nikolai Drachinsky, who traveled the world as a photojournalist and curator.

The multicontour technique attracts and captivates with the multiplicity of image and color options. For photographers of the "multi-contour" Drachinsky is an extension of the boundaries of photography. For the audience - a meeting with Moscow in a new guise thanks to the unique author’s technique and its artistic capabilities.

Nikolai Ivanovich Drachinsky was a well-known photojournalist in the 1950s and 1960s and worked in leading editions of the USSR - the newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda, Izvestia, and the magazine Ogonyok. Since the mid-1960s, as a curator, he realized his dream and created the exhibition “The USSR - the Country and People in Art Photographs”. The dramaturgy of the curatorial script, she combined about 2000 photos of more than 500 leading photographers of the USSR in 17 thematic sections. The exhibition was first shown in the USA in 1970, then in the Moscow Manege and until 1976 visited more than 100 countries of the world. In the mid-1970s, Nikolai Drachinsky actively experimented with the artistic and technological side of photography.

Exhibition opening: August 16 at 19.00. Entrance to the opening is free.

Within the framework of the exhibition, on August 23 at 18.00 a meeting will be held with the curators of the exhibition Irina Chmyreva and Alla Vakhromeeva, dedicated to the photographic experiments of the exhibition’s hero Nikolai Drachinsky. Free admission.