William Brumfield Russian Architecture Digital Collection

Kizhi Pogost at Kizhi island Museum

This database contains over 29,000 images of Russian sites, mostly buildings constructed from the Middle Ages and the present. The original film photographs were taken between 1970 and 2008 by a single photographer, Professor William Craft Brumfield of Tulane University. For the database, the photographer scanned negatives to produce TIFFs. The TIFFs were sent to the University of Washington and converted to JPEGs, which were edited using Photoshop, producing the images viewable on this website. Copyright to all images -- digital, prints, and negatives -- is owned by William Brumfield; to order a reproduction or inquire about permissions, contact the photographer at williambrumfield@gmail.com.

The web site images, grouped by city, are displayed alphabetically by city using the CONTENTdm digital asset management system. A single thumbnail image represents each city with the name of the city and its administrative region (oblast in Russian) displayed beneath each thumbnail. Make a selection, either a thumbnail or the hotlinked name of a city, to see images of buildings in the selected city. In the resulting display, all images can be selected using the right sidebar headed by two tabs, “Thumbnails” and "Content." Images can also be searched using a CONTENTdm keyword search or an advanced search, and images can be re-grouped as needed.

Each image is accompanied by an "Object Description" and a "Description." The "Object Description" briefly describes the city in which the site depicted is located. The following "Description" describes the site and the image, using properties such as title (the photograph’s view information), the name of the work depicted, the name of the building complex if applicable, detailed geographic location information, any pertinent dates and associated names, and architectural details seen in the photograph. This information about each building/photograph is searchable using CONTENTdm services.

The map below is a map of Russia overlaid with several hundred icons. The icons almost always represent specific cities. At times, rather than a city, the icon represents a raion or oblast. Hovering your mouse over an icon displays a link to images of sites in the represented location. Almost all images in the database can be discovered using the map; however the CONTENTdm search interfaces provide the most comprehensive access to the images.

Map of Locations

Zoom in to view more selections