Dimitri Jermakov
Dmitri (D.) Jermakov (1846–1916) was one of the most important professional photographers of pre-revolutionary Tiflis. Born in 1846, he began working in photography in 1866 and within four years became widely recognized as one of the leading experts in the field. As the newspaper Kavkaz noted, “Jermakov’s photographs are distinguished by their artistic perfection and are of great interest from the standpoint of ethnography and archaeology.”
During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, Jermakov served as a military photographer, documenting historical events of the era. In 1880, he established his own photographic studio in Tiflis, where he worked successfully across multiple genres.
Jermakov traveled extensively throughout Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Persia, Turkey, and the North Caucasus. He photographed cities, landscapes, architectural monuments, and diverse ethnic communities. He participated in numerous exhibitions and received prestigious awards. In 1897, he was elected a corresponding member of the Caucasus Society for the Support of Fine Arts; in 1907, he became a member of the Caucasus Department of the Moscow Archaeological Society; and in 1912, he was among the founding members of the Tiflis Fine Arts Society.
He frequently joined scientific expeditions. In 1910, he traveled to Svaneti, producing around nine hundred photographs, many documenting architectural and archaeological monuments. In Imereti, he carefully recorded monuments such as Jruchi, Katskhi, Savane, and Mgvimevi Monastery. Some of these monuments no longer exist, and their visual memory survives only through his photographs.
Jermakov died on November 10, 1916, in Tiflis.
Over nearly fifty years of work, he created a vast archive of approximately 30,000 negatives. His photographic series covered a remarkable geographic range, including Tiflis and its surroundings, Kutaisi, Batumi, Yerevan, Ani, Baku, Kislovodsk, Yalta, Ashgabat, Samarkand, Bukhara, Constantinople, Trabzon, Athens, Varna, Tehran, Isfahan, Abkhazia, Kakheti, Khevsureti, and Pshavi.
Of particular importance is his Tiflis series, which offers an almost chronological visual history of the city’s development over more than half a century.
In 1918, his collection was acquired by the Georgian Society of History and Ethnography and Tbilisi State University.
Beyond its documentary value, Jermakov’s work possesses significant artistic merit. He closely followed technical innovations in photography, working initially with wet collodion plates and later with dry gelatin plates of various formats. He printed contact sheets on brown-toned paper and rarely retouched his negatives, carefully composing each image at the moment of capture.
A defining feature of his artistic style was his strong sense of spatial depth. When photographing historical monuments, he sought not only to document them but to convey their character and evoke a lasting impression on the viewer.
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