State Museum and Exhibition Centre for Photography ROSPHOTO
St.Petersburg A-Ya Society

Supported by
The Committee of Culture of Saint-Petersburg
Ministry for Culture of theRussian Federation

LYUDMILA TABOLINA. Anniversary Exhibition.
19.04.2012 – 03.06.2012
Opening: 18 April 2012 at 18.00, Yard building exhibition hall

The retrospective exhibition of Lyudmila Tabolina's work at ROSPHOTO embraces a large body of works, both unfamiliar to large audience and those that made the author well known.

Lyudmila Tabolina shoots with a monocle, a most simple concave-convex lens. Her use of the soft focus optics and familiarity with the old printing techniques are the basis of her recognizable style that continues within the Pictorialist photography tradition. The adhrernts of this movement, originated in the second half of XIX century, regarded photography as a means of artistic expression based on the laws of painting. Pictorialists aimed to raise photography to the level of high art. While consciously avoiding the documentality typical for domestic photography they created landscapes, still lifes, and inornate genre scenes. Simplifying the composition and addressing to well known subjects, masters of Pictiorialism seeked to return the original significance to the artistic methods.
Having studied photography at the legendary Mirror photography club (that represents the Soviet photojournalism tradition), Lyudmila Tabolina was for a long time in a search for her artistic method and found the «pictorial method» by mere chance, just when she was about to give up photography. At this time she met Georgy Kolosov the ideologist of the Pictorial trend in contemporary Russian photography.

Kolosov remembers:
« … at the first Women Photographers exhibition in Ryazan she showed a wonderful series of photographs of her grandfather's house, shot with Lubitel camera. The contemplation of mystery, which became the main feature of her further series and cycles, stroke my eye at once. I immediately armed her with a monocle, and already in October 1992, at the first Pictorial photography festival in Serpukhov, Tabolina exhibited some audaciously simple images on rural themes. Later on came her St.Petersburg cycle, classical or mysterious at different times, that she is still working on, the Ladygino Village shot in Valday mountains, and much more.
There is no sence in listing all her awards during these years. I have not met a person more indifferent to the surface glos of success. <...> The two main features that she possesses as an artist are audacity and diversity. She can easily change from the obvious literary symbolics to being purely photographic. She regards everything with a childlike photographic straightness. This could be the reason that she reveals so easily what we are afraid to reveal.»

Lyudmila Tabolina took part in over a hundred group exhibitions and had over 40 personal exhibitions. Her works are represented in the collections of such museums and galleries as The State Russian Museum, The State Museum of the History of Saint-Petersburg, Museum of the History of Photography (Saint-Petersburg), Yaroslavl Art Museum, Nabokov Museum (Saint-Petersburg), Moscow House of Photography, Museum of Organic Culture (Kolomna), Metenkov Museum of Photography (Yekaterinburg), F. M. Dostoevsky Literary Memorial Museum (Saint-Petersburg), Borey Art Center etc.