Kharkiv, A. Fedecki - a woman in a portrait photograph from 1898.

[PortraitPHOTOGRAPHY - female - shot in card de visite format]. [1898]. Photograph form. 9.3x6.5 cm on original base form. 10.5x6.7 cm, by Alfred Fedecki in Kharkiv.
The portraitist is shown in bust, looking straight ahead. Photo pasted on original cardboard backing with gilded edges. In the lower right part of the composition an imprint: "1898". On the lower margin of the backing gilt print of the photographer. On the back an advertising vignette of the plant with award medals. Good condition.
A. Fedecki (born 1857 in Zhytomyr, died July 21, 1902 in Minsk) - one of the most prominent Ukrainian photographers of Polish origin of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Alfred Fedecki was born in 1857 in Zhytomyr to a Polish family. He received his photographic education at the Academy of Arts in Vienna. He began his professional work in Kyiv under the tutelage of an outstanding photographer, Vladimir Vysotsky. He then opened his own photographic atelier in Kharkiv in 1886. In his independent artistic work, Fedetsky began to move away from the obligatory static "family" composition of a photograph toward "painterly" portraiture of people. Innovative for the time, his photographs brought the artist great popularity and numerous awards at national and international exhibitions. His high skills were appreciated by leading personalities of political and artistic life. He is known for his photographic portraits of the tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II, the Orthodox clergyman Father John Kronshtsky, composers Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Konstantin Gorski. He collaborated with many publishing houses, and his works were featured in the most widely read magazines in Moscow and St. Petersburg. A. Fedecki was also interested in all technical innovations, which he tried to use in photography. He often experimented in his work, including attempts to record sounds, the artistic application of X-ray photography, took the first color photographs, and was the first in the then Russian Empire to organize a public cinematographic show in Kharkiv on December 2, 1896. He died in Minsk. He was buried in Kharkiv. (Wikipedia).