Rafail Levitsky - Photographer

Photographer

Rafail Levitsky's father was the famous Sergei Lvovich Levitsky (1819–1898, Moscow, Russian: Сергей Львович Львов-Левицкий), who is considered the patriarch of Russian photography and one of Europe's most important early photographic pioneers, inventors and innovators.

With a career that began in the 1840s, working as a daguerreotypist in Germany and Italy; Levitsky's father knew Daguerre personally, and introduced the term ‘light painting’ to Russia. It was he who first proposed the idea to artificially light subjects in a studio setting using electric lighting along with daylight.

With a working life that spanned fifty years, Sergei Levitsky distinguished himself in the technical sphere of photographic development. It was he who designed a bellows camera which significantly improved the process of focusing, and it was he who introduced interchangeable decorative backgrounds, as well as the retouching of negatives to reduce or eliminate technical deficiencies.

Sergei is perhaps best known for a series of photographs of famous artists, writers and public figures (included among these notable figures were Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Vladimir Sollogub, Fedor Tyutchev, Peter Vyazemsky, Alexander Strugovshchikov, Vasily Botkin, Ivan Panaev, Pavel Annenkov, Dmitry Grigorovich, Alexander Herzen, Sergey Volkonsky, and Leo Tolstoy). It is perhaps this association that led Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821–1878) to purchase a painting by Rafail Levitsky that hangs in the living room of the N.A. Nekrasov Apartment Museum to this day.

Sergei Levitsky was also one of the founders of Russian's first Photographic Societies, a writer of articles for the Russian magazine "Photograph" and was actively involved in organizing national and international photographic exhibitions throughout his lifetime. He wrote memoirs in two volumes entitled, Reminiscences of an Old Photographer (1892) and How I Became a Photographer (1896). He is buried in St. Petersburg's Smolenskoye Cemetery.