Naum Granovsky foundation

Naum Granovsky (1910 – 1984) began his career at an early age, at the age of 16 he came to Moscow from his hometown of Alexandria (Ukraine) and got a job as a laboratory assistant at the TASS Press Cliché. From 1927 he worked as a correspondent for the TASS Photo Chronicle, and from 1934 as a photo master of the Izobrazitelnoe iskusstvo publishing house (IZOGIZ). Since the beginning of this period, Granovsky began to consistently film and depict the way Moscow grew and changed with every year.

“Moscow chronicler”, “chief architectural photographer of the USSR” – Granovsky was professed by his contemporaries. For more than half a century, Moscow remained the main character in Granovsky’s photographs, he looked at her as a living person, noting all the changes that were happening to her. He came to the same streets and squares, consistently collecting the changing image of Moscow in the 20th century. Of course, his work was a great success not only in the capital but also abroad. Residents of many cities would like to see their native land through the lens of Granovsky.

On Sverdlov square on the day of the celebration of the 800th anniversary of Moscow (Naum Granovsky with with a camera) 07.09.1947
From the collection of the Museum of Moscow

In 1941, he was a military photojournalist for the “Trevoga” newspaper, filmed a lot on the front lines and captured the heroic defence of Moscow. Three albums with photographs of military chronicles and Granovsky are now in the Central Museum of the Armed Forces.

In 1946, Naum Granovsky returned to TASS Photo Chronicle and worked there for the rest of the years. In this period, he began to travel all over the USSR, architects and sculptors from Moscow, Stalingrad ( Volgograd well ), Kiev and Minsk and Smolensk and Vladimir and, Kuibyshev and Samara, Voronezh and, Tallinn, Baku, Tbilisi, Riga and Granovskiy have entrusted photography of his works. In many of these cities, he stayed only a few days. Still, even for such a short period, he was able to capture the spirit of post-war prosperity of cities and the development of Soviet architecture.

The Naum Granovsky Negative Foundation is one of the few photographic sources covering the geography of the former USSR so widely. Much of what he filmed in the 50s – 80s no longer exists or is in decline today: the largest outdoor swimming pool in the USSR “Moscow” and the Ferris wheel loved by many in Gorky Park were demolished, one of the first Soviet hotels in Baku – “Intourist” (as well as Moscow – “Intourist” and “Russia”), the sanatoriums “Shakhtar” and “Tsentrosoyuz” in Tskhaltubo have long been abandoned. The surviving footage of a vanishing heritage is a valuable resource for the preservation of cultural and historical memory.

In the 1960s, the Progress Publishing House issued sets of postcards with views of Soviet cities, which were filmed by Granovsky, as well as several series of postcards “Moscow Old and New”, where his early photographs are compared with contemporary photographs at that time.

From the late 70s to 1985, Granovsky’s photographs were published in the newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva under a particular heading “Moscow Yesterday and Today”, which compared the shots he took from the same shooting point in the 30s-40s and 70s.

The works of Naum Granovsky were highly appreciated during his lifetime. He was a participant in major Soviet and foreign exhibitions, the author of several books and albums, an honoured cultural worker of the RSFSR (1968), a member of the Union of Journalists of the USSR (1958), and also a member of the Union of Architects of the USSR. In 2017, the Lumiere Gallery acquired the copyright and the Naum Granovsky Foundation and today is the only copyright holder who exclusively represents the master’s works.