Infundibulum Mart

In July 2018, a team of outstanding creatives and I went to the ancient town of Rostov Veliky to photograph Mart (The Market), Infundibulum’s SS2019 collection. Some came as volunteer models, some as crew.

Three young women in folk dress offer berries outside a log house, a colour photograph by Prokudin-Gorskii.

Sergey Prokudin-Gorskii was an early pioneer of colour photography. A chemist, engineer and devoted photographer, he produced a vast body of work at the turn of the 20th century, travelling the empire of his day by train and by steamboat to document its life. His work includes several hundred colour photographs, each a unique document of its time.

A bald, bearded man in a red robe carries two red fuel cans on a yoke, a bell tower behind.

His process was ahead of its time: he made colour photographs long before colour film existed. An early precursor of today’s RGB colour, it took three black-and-white photographs of the same scene, each through its own filter: red, green and blue. Projected through the same filters in the darkroom, the three negatives together made one colour image.

An engraving of a plate camera beside a magic lantern with three lenses, one above the other.

A man in a mustard suit with a wicker basket over his head stands by a red gate.

A model by a white church appears upside down on the gridded ground glass of a large-format camera.

Prokudin-Gorskii’s process had inspired me for a while, so when Ilya Varegin asked me to shoot his next collection, it seemed a perfect fit. A prominent costume designer and the founder of Infundibulum, Ilya makes work that honours historical heritage and stays contemporary.

A man in a hat and glasses balances a tray of bread loaves on his shoulder by a church dome.

We wanted a strong classical look with a modern subject, without pretending to be historical. That mattered to us: the image could look out of its time, but signs of contemporary life had to stay in the frame.

A man in a dark coat and hat stands by the carved white wall of an old building.

A man in a white suit stands on a wooden pier among moored boats on a grey lake.

The basket-headed man in mustard stands on rail tracks, a wicker basket in each hand.

The man in the red robe carries fuel cans on a yoke under an archway, a bell tower behind.

After the 4×5 frames, we kept some time for digital shots and repeated Prokudin-Gorskii’s approach there too. This one combines three black-and-white frames, shot one after another through a red, a green and a blue filter.

The basket-headed man in mustard stands in tall grass by a dark wooden shed.

The basket-headed man walks along overgrown rail tracks past a graffitied fence.

A barefoot man in a red robe sits on a bench by a wooden door, holding a staff.

A man in a white suit holds a string of dried fish before a huge round green door.

A man in a black suit and hat leans against a pillar in a shaded arcade.

A man in a long brown coat and a hat stands by a whitewashed church wall and a green door, holding a red kettle.

The project is a collaboration with Broncolor.

The crew sets a Broncolor light on a stand as a model in white waits on a gravel road.

Production crew

Art supervisor: Tatiana Almond · Chief assistant: Timur Ivanov · BTS videographer: Nikita Goryachkin · Models: Gleb Gavrish, Evgeni Zamyatin, Johann Nikadimus, Ilia Kuznetsov and The Basket Head · With the help and support of Svetlana Pavlova, Elizaveta Sokolova and Elen Panteleeva · Truly magical film development and scanning: DPArtphoto lab

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