Travel As Art

Pavel Manylov is a traveller and writer. For his book of stories from famous hotels around the world, we came up with a double cover picture.

Prokudin-Gorskii’s colour portrait of a seated man in a blue robe, beside the three plates it was made from.

The main cover was devoted to Savva Mamontov, an industrialist and patron of the arts from the beginning of the 20th century. So we borrowed the technique of a photographer of his time, Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, a pioneer of colour photography. He shot three black-and-white frames in a row, through red, green and blue filters. Combined, they make one colour image.

The front cover: a man in a bowler hat sits on suitcases before a hotel backdrop, in colour.

The red-filter frame of the front cover, in black and white.

The green-filter frame of the front cover, in black and white.

The blue-filter frame of the front cover, in black and white.

The inside front cover balances the homage to Prokudin-Gorskii. It is meant to be the exact opposite of a manual, hand-developed, vintage technique: digital, very digital.

The inside front cover: a man stands in a studio lit by red and green lights and lens flares.

I shot it through a vintage anamorphic lens, for the most cinematic look possible.

The crew poses in a studio in front of a green screen, lights all around. — Behind the scenes of the Travel As Art cover shoot

Production crew

Technical director: Timur Ivanov · Engineer: Ilya Ponomarev · Gaffer: Dmitry Davydov · Lighting team: Andrey Rodionov, German Tretyakov, Evgeny Naumenko · Producer: Anna Bednieri · Second producer and assistant: Alyona Kondyurina · BTS videographer: Nikita Goryachkin

More of my work with writers and publishers →