HERMITAGE.
ERA OF PHOROGRAPHY.

Virtual flash-mob

Being in a museum, when there are no visitors, is considered as a special privilege and rare pleasure. In the museum, the visitor – is neither the most important, nor the best, but the museum is dead without the visitors. Crowds of visitors – is a typical feature of an image of such museum as Hermitage. It is difficult to regulate this crowd, it is annoying, when you are trying to walk through it. Everyone is feeling annoyance. And it is desirable to manage it. It is difficult.

But it is also possible to construct another one, the nice crowd. Modern photography technique, multiplied by patience and artist’s skills, is allowing to combine in a single space a lot of people, who were there in a different periods of time. Everyone is captured on its spot and several temporary pictures are superimposed on one another. The result of it is an artificial flash-mob. It is giving a movement for museum spaces, both rational and irrational in the same time. And - a sign of time: almost all of them are taking photos of the museum or themselves, some of them are adopting picture poses, just as well as in other museums of the world.

Jordan stairs, Pavilion hall, Dvortsovaya square, ex-Matiss’s hall are acquiring a new dimension. For a many years, Yury Molodkovets is inventing these new dimensions, finding unexpected perspectives, that perfectly enriches the image of our museum. Nine photographs and nine video-films represents the museum very well both by themselves, or as an accompaniment to any event, that tells about it. They have already participated the celebration of 250-years of the Hermitage, that coincides the 175-years of photography invention. The photo projects of Hermitage are quite diverse. This one – is one of the most successful and interesting. The time-lapse technique and frame-by-frame shooting over six hours are turning into artistic method.

The “Hermitage. Era of photography” project – is one of the innovations, that our museum and its creative collective has celebrated quarter of century from creation of it with. It is moderately conservative, as well as moderately modern. It has already become a good form of pictorial narrative about how the life of the museum is looks like from the inside and from the outside. A lot of visitors and employees of the museum could find themselves on these “slowed” pictures. I have found myself on it, heading through Dvortsovaya square from Zimny palace to the main headquarter. Now it is one the main routes for the visitors.