Painterly Still Lifes and Belle Époque Aesthetics in Finland – Wladimir Schohin’s Autochromes
Wladimir Schohin (1862–1934) was a Finnish-born Russian merchant as well as Finland’s most accomplished pictorialist and autochromist. Schohin could be described as a well-kept secret in the history of color photography, as not much is known about him and even less has been written in English. In one of the only English treatises on Schohin from 1993 John Wood went as far as to write: “-- on the basis of his autochrome work alone [Schohin] could be considered one of the greatest photographers of the century.” The majority of Schohin’s surviving autochromes were donated to the Finnish Museum of Photography by Finland’s oldest photoclub AFK in 2024. The museum’s curator of collections Max Fritze lays out the context of early Finnish photographic art and presents select autochromes from the collection.
Max Fritze (b. 1988) is a Finnish art historian. He has been a curator of collections at the Finnish Museum of Photography since 2019. Fritze is especially interested in discourses surrounding early Finnish photographic art. He has researched Finnish pictorialism and published several texts on the topic, most notably Ideas about Ennobled Photography: Pictorialism in Finland, 1897–1930 (abstract in English) in The Finnish Museum of Photography’s publication Piktorialismi – Valokuvataiteen synty (Pictorialism – the Dawn of Photographic art), 2022.
Reading material on Schohin in English:
- Wood, John: The art of the Autochrome – The Birth of Color Photography, 1993. Iowa City : University of Iowa press. p. 41–43.
- Carpelan, Bert: Wladimir Schohin: an Early Color Master. The Frozen Image – Scandinavian Photography, 1982. Walker Art Center. - New York : Abbeville. p.120–123.
Online reading material in Finnish (feel free to use Deepl to translate them):