Opening this week at Calvert 22 Gallery is a photographic exhibition offering a fascinating insight into suburban and rural Russia at the end of two major empires.

Close & Far: Russian Photography Now Far compares the early colour pre-revolutionary works of Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky with a new generation of photographers and video artists who explore identity and place in early 21st century Russia.

These contemporary artists are the first since the fall of the Soviet empire to work relatively free of state control, offering a stark juxtaposition to Prokudin-Gorsky’s images of Romanov empire Russia – whose works were personally commissioned by Nicholas II, the last tsar. It’s a dramatic look at Russia then and now, unified by the instability of its wavering identity…

Tempe Nakiska: What did you set out to communicate in this exhibition?
Kate Bush: In this third decade since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia is grappling both with its past and its future. This is the first generation of artists to be making art relatively free of state control. Russia in 2014 is considerably smaller than when Prokudin-Gorsky was photographing – yet it is still the largest country in the world, and still a land of dramatic extremes and dramatic diversity. Where Prokudin-Gorsky witnessed for himself the effects of galloping Russian colonisation in the Caucases and Central Asia, today’s young artists are working in the aftermath of the collapse of that Empire, as well as the subsequent Soviet empire, both inside the space of a century.

A sense of place –the ‘landscape’ in the widest sense – has played a formative part in the making of Russia’s historic and modern cultural. It is true for many nations, of course, that the landscape incarnates a feeling of national identity, but it is perhaps deeply and emotionally true of Russia.  Many young Russian artists are conscious of the seismic change that has happened for their generation. The exhibition asks: how are Russia’s young artists and photographers approaching the subject of identity and place, in post-Soviet times?

TN: What are the similarities you draw between the two eras of work?
KB: Of course the work of a pre-Revolutionary photographer working between 1909 and 1915 is incredible different to young artists working now.  But nevertheless there are relationships to be found. Prokudin-Gorsky was driven to photograph the entire Russian empire: he wanted to create pictures of people, places, landscapes, buildings in order for there to be wider knowledge about the culture of the Empire.  Young artists like Alexander Gronsky, Max Sher and Olya Ivanova are doing the same thing in the exhibition, documenting people and places.  Many of the contemporary artists are also, like Prokudin-Gorsky, interested in the relationship between tradition and modernity – between history, and the future, or the post-Soviet.

Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky, ‘Bukhara bureaucrat’. Bukhara, between 1905 and 1915, Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Prokudin-Gorsky Collection, Washington D.C.

Olya Ivanova, ‘Vladimir’, Kich-Gorodok, 2010. Courtesy of the artist

TN: How did colour come into play in Sergei’s portrayal of Russia?
KB: Prokudin-Gorsky was one of the most important pioneers in the development of colour photography as a medium and a technology.  He greatly augmented the work of people like Dr Adolph Miethe  in Berlin who were leading the development of the colour separation process.  Because Prokudin-Gorskii was an expert chemist he was able to invent a much more sensitive mix of chemicals with which to coat the glass plate negatives. This resulted in a colour spectrum that had never been seen before – it was wider and more naturalistic than ever before.

It is hard to imagine the excitement of seeing photographs in colour for the first time: but this is what happened when Prokudin-Gorskii projected his images in Russia at the beginning of the 20^th century.  Colour photographs had quite simply never been seen before.  It was deeply innovative.

TN: This was pre-revolutionary, pre-unrest Russia. Was there an undercurrent in Prokudin-Gorsky’s work that reflected this?
KB: Prokudin-Gorsky was commissioned directly by the Tsar, and it was advisable, given the autocratic nature of his patron, to remain broadly apolitical.  However, it is also apparent looking at his photographs that he noticed certain ripples beneath the smooth surfaces of imperial Russia in the last days of the Tsar. He noticed who was poor and how they lived.  He noticed who had been abruptly moved in to settle a newly colonised area and who had been moved out. He noticed prisoners and migrant labourers and despots and capitalists and idle aristocrats. He observed every strata of society of the time.

Close and Far: Russian Photography Now runs until 17th August at Calvert 22 Gallery, 22 Calvert Ave, London E2