Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
In 1920, Prokudin-Gorsky remarried and had a daughter with his assistant Maria Fedorovna née Schedrimo. The family finally settled in Paris in 1922, reuniting with his first wife and children. Prokudin-Gorsky set up a photo studio there together with his three adult children, naming it after his fourth child, Elka. In the 1930s, the elderly Prokudin-Gorsky continued with lectures showing his photographs of Russia to young Russians in France, but stopped commercial work and left the studio to his children, who named it Gorsky Frères. He died in Paris on September 27, 1944, a month after the Liberation of Paris. He is buried in the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.
Boris Smelov
In 1977, he received the Gold Medal for the reportage series at the 11th International Photo Salon in Bucharest. Later Smelov became largely associated with the Mitki group, an art movement emerged from Vladimir Shinkarev’s literary work Mitki (1984-1990), which expresses the anxieties surrounding Perestroika in the 1980s. During Perestroika, Boris Smelov began to participate in exhibitions intensively in USSR and abroad including Great Britain, Germany, United States, Finland, Norway, among others. In 1991 he went to Washington, where he took part in the exhibition «Changing Reality». Main theme of Smelov’s work was Leningrad — Saint-Petersburg. His name is associated with the notion of ‘Saint-Petersburg still life’. He was using old objects from Saint-Petersburg households to create still life images filled with deep nostalgia for the past. Smelov died at the age of forty-seven in 1998 in Saint-Petersburg. He was buried on January 24 at the Smolensk Orthodox cemetery.