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Photo Archives are Sleeping Beauties. The Black Sea Coast in the Photographs of Tengiz Purtskhvanidze

Photo Archives are Sleeping Beauties. The Black Sea Coast in the Photographs of Tengiz Purtskhvanidze

© Tengiz Furtskhvanidze. 1960 - 1980
Photo Archives are Sleeping Beauties
The Black Sea Coast in the Photographs of Tengiz Purtskhvanidze
(1960-1980)




Photo archives that no one cares for are like sleeping beauties. While they sleep, all the stories and images of people, skies and seas, flowers, forests and animals they contain also sleep, as do the time and space and the vast collected knowledge that they contain. However, from the moment that archived and collected photographs become the subject of study and research, all the times, places, faces and stories that make up this visual heritage come alive. The archive becomes a source of new knowledge and the past comes closer to the present.


One of these 'sleeping beauty' archives, hitherto unknown, has unveiled the work of Soviet-era photographer Tengiz Purtskhvanidze, who actively worked for the Georgian press from the 1960s to the 1980s. His archive was donated to the Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum by the photographer Vakho Khetagurი in 2020.


Two large albums combine hundreds of contact prints of Tengiz Purtskhvanidze's photographs. These miniature prints are carefully numbered and sorted by theme: Georgia's resorts, portraits of women, the country's biodiversity with hundreds of images of forests and different trees and flowers, the Black Sea coast of Georgia and Ukraine—Abkhazia, Crimea, Adjara. Thanks to these archives, a large series of previously unknown photos of Abkhazia have notably been uncovered. 

Yet almost nothing is known about the photographer himself. The little information available confirms that during his career Tengiz Purtskhvanidze worked for Georgian magazines such as Georgian Nature and Georgian Woman. 

This unique collection has begun to be studied more closely, and this exhibition, which combines up to 100 contact prints of previously unknown photos of the Black Sea region, is an attempt to collect additional information about Tengiz Purtskhvanidze himself and his career. It is also an attempt to wake up a photo archive that fell asleep long, long ago, and that has remained unknown to this day.
Upcoming
Dec 12. 2022 - Feb 17. 2023
Tbilisi Photography & Multimedia Museum M. Kostava 14., Stamba
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