Bulla, Karl (1855-1930), Alexander (1881-1943), and Viktor (1883-?), Russian photographers of German or Swiss extraction. Although biographical details are sparse, it seems that Karl, the father, opened a portrait studio in St Petersburg in 1875, but after ten years moved into photojournalism, based at 110 Nevsky Prospect. He worked for the St Petersburg press and foreign papers such as Die Woche, the Berliner illustrirte Zeitung, and L'Illustration, and founded an important early agency (with the by-line ‘Foto Bulla’). Over a long career he covered the capital's growth into a major industrial and business centre, military and naval activity and shipbuilding, theatrical life and personalities, floods and fires—he was official photographer of the St Petersburg fire brigades—and political events ranging from revolutionary bomb attacks to the 1905 Revolution. He periodically published albums entitled Chronicle of St Petersburg Life. In 1916 or 1917 he settled in Estonia.
Karl's sons studied in Germany before becoming photographers themselves. Alexander specialized in portraiture, then photojournalism, doing his most important work during the First World War and the 1920s. He was arrested in 1930 and sent to the notorious White Sea Canal project. Viktor, also a photojournalist, sometimes worked with his father, for example on a visit to Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana in July 1908 to mark the writer's 80th birthday, resulting in nearly 90 pictures. But by then he was an established figure, having photographed the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) for the magazine Niva, and subsequently founded a documentary film company, Apollo; he became one of Russia's first newsreel cameramen. His major achievement in both media was his coverage of the events of 1917, from the fall of the tsarist regime to the Bolshevik seizure of power, then the Civil War. He took celebrated portraits of Lenin in 1920 and 1921 and (with Alexander) participated in the exhibition Ten Years of Soviet Photography shown in Moscow and Leningrad in 1928. Yet he too was arrested in 1937, and died either in 1938 or during the Second World War.
The largest Bulla collection, of nearly 100, 000 negatives, is in the State Central Archive of Film and Photographic Documentary, St Petersburg.
— Robin Lenman
Bibliography
- Barchatova, Y. V., et al., A Portrait of Tsarist Russia: Unknown Photographs from the Soviet Archives, trans. M. Robinson (1990)
