Image Copyright: William C. Brumfield
This site presents William Craft Brumfield’s extensive photographic documentation of Jewish monuments and sites of memory in the European part of Russia as well as in Siberia. Many of them appear here for the first time, and they reveal the presence of deeply rooted Jewish communities across the former Russian empire and Soviet Union.
Brumfield is Professor of Slavic studies at Tulane University, Honorary Fellow of the Russian Academy of the Arts, and a renowned architectural photographer.
He is the author and photographer of numerous works on Russian architecture: Gold in Azure: One Thousand Years of Russian Architecture (1983); The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (1991); A History of Russian Architecture (1993), Lost Russia: Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture (1995); and Landmarks of Russian Architecture: A Photographic Survey (1997). He edited and contributed chapters to Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams (1990), Christianity and the Arts in Russia (1991), and Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History (1993). He has also published twenty-four books in Russia devoted primarily to that country's regional architectural heritage.
Brumfield has spent a total of ten years in Russia. His photographs of Russian architecture, exhibited in the U.S., Russia, France, and Canada, are part of the Image Collections at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. He has received fellowship and grant support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Library of Congress, International Research and Exchanges Board, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies (Woodrow Wilson Center), the American Council for International Education, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Kress Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Trust for Mutual Understanding.
In April 2002 Brumfield was elected to the State Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences. In May 2006 he was elected Honorary Member of the Russian Academy of the Arts.