Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya is a curator, collector of Soviet sculpture of the first third of the 20th century, and photographer.
Born in Leningrad, she graduated from the State University of Culture and Arts with a degree in cultural studies and art expertise.
From 2000 to 2004, she headed the photo department at the magazine SPb. Sobaka.ru.
Since 2003, as a photographer she has participated in over 60 exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Her works can be found in the collections of Russian and international museums, as well as in private collections in Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States.
Since 2016, she has curated museum exhibitions, including the Petrov-Vodkin's Circle project at the State Russian Museum and exhibitions of Soviet sculpture from the first third of the 20th century in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod.
ICOM member since 2025.
Lives and works in St. Petersburg.
Born in Leningrad, she graduated from the State University of Culture and Arts with a degree in cultural studies and art expertise.
From 2000 to 2004, she headed the photo department at the magazine SPb. Sobaka.ru.
Since 2003, as a photographer she has participated in over 60 exhibitions in Russia and abroad. Her works can be found in the collections of Russian and international museums, as well as in private collections in Russia, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States.
Since 2016, she has curated museum exhibitions, including the Petrov-Vodkin's Circle project at the State Russian Museum and exhibitions of Soviet sculpture from the first third of the 20th century in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod.
ICOM member since 2025.
Lives and works in St. Petersburg.
2025 — Sergey Konenkov. 20th Century. ROSIZO, The Packhouses Art Center at the State Art Museum, Nizhny Novgorod.
2023 — Yulia. Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow.
— 17/37. Soviet Sculpture. Takeoff. ROSIZO, New Manege, Moscow.
— USSR Palace of Culture, curator of the Sculpture and Monumental Art section. ROSIZO, Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow.
2016 — Petrov-Vodkin’s Circle. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
2023 — Yulia. Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow.
— 17/37. Soviet Sculpture. Takeoff. ROSIZO, New Manege, Moscow.
— USSR Palace of Culture, curator of the Sculpture and Monumental Art section. ROSIZO, Manege Central Exhibition Hall, Moscow.
2016 — Petrov-Vodkin’s Circle. State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
Separated. A. Esipovich-Roginskaya, M. Makogonova. St. Petersburg: Publishing and Printing Company "NP-Print", 2024, 288 pp.
Yulia. Exhibition catalog. Moscow: Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, 2023, 111 pp.
17/37. Soviet Sculpture. Takeoff. Exhibition catalog. Moscow: ROSIZO, 2023, 328 pp.
USSR Palace of Culture. Exhibition catalog. St. Petersburg: State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, 2023, 324 pp.
Petrov-Vodkin's Circle. Exhibition catalog. St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2015, 272 pp.
Alla Espovich: That's it. Palace Editions. St Petersburg, 2013. 196 pp.
Alla Espovich: No Comment. Exhibition catalog, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2004, 84 pp.
Yulia. Exhibition catalog. Moscow: Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, 2023, 111 pp.
17/37. Soviet Sculpture. Takeoff. Exhibition catalog. Moscow: ROSIZO, 2023, 328 pp.
USSR Palace of Culture. Exhibition catalog. St. Petersburg: State Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, 2023, 324 pp.
Petrov-Vodkin's Circle. Exhibition catalog. St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2015, 272 pp.
Alla Espovich: That's it. Palace Editions. St Petersburg, 2013. 196 pp.
Alla Espovich: No Comment. Exhibition catalog, St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2004, 84 pp.
Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya is known not only as a photographer, but also as a curator and collector. She is deeply committed to art and possesses a highly distinctive personal taste, despite the breadth of her interests. There is, however, one quality that runs through every sphere of her activity: a focus on the human being, on personality, character, and a person’s life. Indeed, in Esipovich-Roginskaya’s photographic series, one finds neither landscapes nor traditional still lifes. Her camera is invariably trained on people and their world: the interiors they inhabit, the details of their clothing, and the objects that help construct their image – an image often deliberately exaggerated by the artist herself.
This specific vision appears to have been shaped by the artist’s early career as a nurse. Illness – above all in the setting of the hospital – strips people of their defenses and exposes their imperfections, their vulnerability, their helplessness, and at times even their strangeness. Yet under precisely these circumstances the desire to live fully, to live “like everyone else”, becomes especially intense. This longing can be discerned in almost all of her photographs.
Later, Alla completed a degree in the humanities at the St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture and Arts, specializing in Art Expertise. That discipline, however, would only truly captivate her somewhat later. At first, Alla pursued the path of a photographer, dedicating more than a decade to this medium. Alongside her studies at the Institute she immersed herself in the theory and practice of photography. She completed a two-year photojournalism course at the St. Petersburg Union of Journalists with Pavel Markin, then attended lectures on the history of photography by Vladimir Nikitin, an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University. When the Baltic Photo School opened at the State Center for Photography, with its emphasis on practical workshops and seminars by photographers from around the world, Alla was among its first students.
From 2000 to 2004, she headed the photo department of Sobaka.ru, a magazine of particular importance to St. Petersburg which, for several decades, has remained the city’s leading lifestyle publication about its people and its social and cultural life. Alla ran the “Portraits” column not only as head of the department, but also as a photographer. Already at that time she began working with a Hasselblad camera, distinguished, in addition to its exceptional quality, by its square format. Alla would remain faithful to this preference, and her works would henceforth stay within the bounds of the square. During her tenure at Sobaka.ru, she created a unique cross-section of portraits of St. Petersburg society, capturing the figures who were then shaping the city’s culture and business. And although these images were primarily photojournalistic in nature, her original approach clearly revealed an anthropological and social interest in her sitters.
Since 2002, Alla has contributed to group exhibitions as a photographer and made a striking debut as a solo artist with the exhibition No Comment, held at the State Russian Museum in 2004. This black-and-white series became, arguably, the most recognizable in her oeuvre and established a distinctive rhythm for her photographic cycles, each characterized by a clearly defined thematic focus.
In the photographs from the No Comment series, elderly people from different professions and social backgrounds are shown within the spaces of their homes, which become almost extensions of themselves. They are clearly posing, yet there is a sense that this is not merely the photographer’s staging but also a game played by the sitters. All of them look directly into the lens: the artist is neither furtively observing nor capturing a fleeting moment, but instead invites her subjects to present themselves to the viewer. Their poses often appear strange; many are fully or partially nude, while the cramped apartment interiors, by contrast, are crammed with objects. This frank corporeality – neither sensual nor aestheticized, but revealing the ageing of the flesh and its imperfections – is intensified by an ethical conflict bound up with the particular vulnerability of the elderly. For many viewers this provokes shock and forces them to feel with unusual intensity. Yet all of this is tempered by the evident sense of comfort the subjects display in the act of showing themselves and their everyday domestic spaces.
The No Comment series consists of two “chapters”, and the central figure of the second part is Alexei Ingelevich, a Germanist, together with his house and family. A house, not an apartment. His personal space expands, extending out into the street. These are, perhaps, Alla’s only works in which we see a horizon and open air, and in which we actually know the sitter’s name and profession. Here the story of the “little man” unfolds from an entirely different angle. The artist is clearly sympathetic to her protagonist, who, having a physical developmental anomaly – presented quite directly in the photographs, in the frank corporeal manner Alla favours – nevertheless lives a full and vivid life.
This series set a distinctive tone for Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya’s subsequent work, defining many of its characteristic features, both in terms of purely visual devices and underlying conceptual concerns. In all her series the artist retains similar elements: the presentation of people looking straight into the camera, a vivid setting that at times is so garish as to verge on the surreal, and the aforementioned square format. These features make her works immediately recognizable and shape her individual style.
On the level of content, she remains preoccupied with the human subject. In almost all her series we can discern a kind of shifting social dimension. The artist clearly leads us toward familiar human problems: inevitable ageing, dissatisfaction with one’s own appearance, unequal marriage, childhood traumas, social status, and so on. These concerns are reflected in the very titles of the series: Sandbox (2005), Happiness (2006), Star of the Scene (2006), Men in My Life (2007), and Marriage (2009). Yet these works avoid presenting any deliberate or overtly explicit social conflict. It seems to hang in the air: figures and objects are composed and arranged in such a way that we feel the weight of the problem, we sense it, even if we do not see it directly. What comes to the fore is a kind of anthropological interest in people who do not conform to conventional ideas of beauty, success, or prosperity – yet who are vivid, striking individuals, whose individuality lies precisely in this deviation from the social stereotype.
Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya’s artistic career appears, in many respects, to be shaped by the particularities of her character. She moves through the stages of her life and, once she has achieved certain results, moves on, entering new spheres of activity while drawing on the experience she has already gained. By the late 2000s, while remaining active as a photographer, she was invited to assemble a collection of pre-war Soviet porcelain. It is noteworthy that the propaganda porcelain to which she now devoted herself with renewed passion also has a distinctive social dimension: its purpose was to explain to people the values of the new world and to fill their everyday domestic space with those values. Having assembled the collection, Alla felt she had exhausted her interest in porcelain and turned to painting, focusing on artists from Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s circle. Once again, the fate of the individual comes to the fore: almost all of these artists lived difficult, and often tragic, lives. Her work resulted in a large-scale exhibition Petrov-Vodkin’s Circle (2016) at the State Russian Museum, accompanied by a catalog. Now working as a curator, Alla shifted her focus to Soviet sculpture, presenting to the public the exhibitions 17/37. Soviet Sculpture. Takeoff (2023) and Sergey Konenkov. 20th Century (2025).
Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya lives and works in St. Petersburg, remaining an influential figure in the city’s cultural life. In a sense, she has closed the circle by becoming the subject of her own “Portraits” column – the very project that launched her career as a photographer.
Maria Saltanova,
Senior Researcher, the State Russian Museum
PhD in Cultural Studies
This specific vision appears to have been shaped by the artist’s early career as a nurse. Illness – above all in the setting of the hospital – strips people of their defenses and exposes their imperfections, their vulnerability, their helplessness, and at times even their strangeness. Yet under precisely these circumstances the desire to live fully, to live “like everyone else”, becomes especially intense. This longing can be discerned in almost all of her photographs.
Later, Alla completed a degree in the humanities at the St. Petersburg State Institute of Culture and Arts, specializing in Art Expertise. That discipline, however, would only truly captivate her somewhat later. At first, Alla pursued the path of a photographer, dedicating more than a decade to this medium. Alongside her studies at the Institute she immersed herself in the theory and practice of photography. She completed a two-year photojournalism course at the St. Petersburg Union of Journalists with Pavel Markin, then attended lectures on the history of photography by Vladimir Nikitin, an associate professor at St. Petersburg State University. When the Baltic Photo School opened at the State Center for Photography, with its emphasis on practical workshops and seminars by photographers from around the world, Alla was among its first students.
From 2000 to 2004, she headed the photo department of Sobaka.ru, a magazine of particular importance to St. Petersburg which, for several decades, has remained the city’s leading lifestyle publication about its people and its social and cultural life. Alla ran the “Portraits” column not only as head of the department, but also as a photographer. Already at that time she began working with a Hasselblad camera, distinguished, in addition to its exceptional quality, by its square format. Alla would remain faithful to this preference, and her works would henceforth stay within the bounds of the square. During her tenure at Sobaka.ru, she created a unique cross-section of portraits of St. Petersburg society, capturing the figures who were then shaping the city’s culture and business. And although these images were primarily photojournalistic in nature, her original approach clearly revealed an anthropological and social interest in her sitters.
Since 2002, Alla has contributed to group exhibitions as a photographer and made a striking debut as a solo artist with the exhibition No Comment, held at the State Russian Museum in 2004. This black-and-white series became, arguably, the most recognizable in her oeuvre and established a distinctive rhythm for her photographic cycles, each characterized by a clearly defined thematic focus.
In the photographs from the No Comment series, elderly people from different professions and social backgrounds are shown within the spaces of their homes, which become almost extensions of themselves. They are clearly posing, yet there is a sense that this is not merely the photographer’s staging but also a game played by the sitters. All of them look directly into the lens: the artist is neither furtively observing nor capturing a fleeting moment, but instead invites her subjects to present themselves to the viewer. Their poses often appear strange; many are fully or partially nude, while the cramped apartment interiors, by contrast, are crammed with objects. This frank corporeality – neither sensual nor aestheticized, but revealing the ageing of the flesh and its imperfections – is intensified by an ethical conflict bound up with the particular vulnerability of the elderly. For many viewers this provokes shock and forces them to feel with unusual intensity. Yet all of this is tempered by the evident sense of comfort the subjects display in the act of showing themselves and their everyday domestic spaces.
The No Comment series consists of two “chapters”, and the central figure of the second part is Alexei Ingelevich, a Germanist, together with his house and family. A house, not an apartment. His personal space expands, extending out into the street. These are, perhaps, Alla’s only works in which we see a horizon and open air, and in which we actually know the sitter’s name and profession. Here the story of the “little man” unfolds from an entirely different angle. The artist is clearly sympathetic to her protagonist, who, having a physical developmental anomaly – presented quite directly in the photographs, in the frank corporeal manner Alla favours – nevertheless lives a full and vivid life.
This series set a distinctive tone for Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya’s subsequent work, defining many of its characteristic features, both in terms of purely visual devices and underlying conceptual concerns. In all her series the artist retains similar elements: the presentation of people looking straight into the camera, a vivid setting that at times is so garish as to verge on the surreal, and the aforementioned square format. These features make her works immediately recognizable and shape her individual style.
On the level of content, she remains preoccupied with the human subject. In almost all her series we can discern a kind of shifting social dimension. The artist clearly leads us toward familiar human problems: inevitable ageing, dissatisfaction with one’s own appearance, unequal marriage, childhood traumas, social status, and so on. These concerns are reflected in the very titles of the series: Sandbox (2005), Happiness (2006), Star of the Scene (2006), Men in My Life (2007), and Marriage (2009). Yet these works avoid presenting any deliberate or overtly explicit social conflict. It seems to hang in the air: figures and objects are composed and arranged in such a way that we feel the weight of the problem, we sense it, even if we do not see it directly. What comes to the fore is a kind of anthropological interest in people who do not conform to conventional ideas of beauty, success, or prosperity – yet who are vivid, striking individuals, whose individuality lies precisely in this deviation from the social stereotype.
Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya’s artistic career appears, in many respects, to be shaped by the particularities of her character. She moves through the stages of her life and, once she has achieved certain results, moves on, entering new spheres of activity while drawing on the experience she has already gained. By the late 2000s, while remaining active as a photographer, she was invited to assemble a collection of pre-war Soviet porcelain. It is noteworthy that the propaganda porcelain to which she now devoted herself with renewed passion also has a distinctive social dimension: its purpose was to explain to people the values of the new world and to fill their everyday domestic space with those values. Having assembled the collection, Alla felt she had exhausted her interest in porcelain and turned to painting, focusing on artists from Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s circle. Once again, the fate of the individual comes to the fore: almost all of these artists lived difficult, and often tragic, lives. Her work resulted in a large-scale exhibition Petrov-Vodkin’s Circle (2016) at the State Russian Museum, accompanied by a catalog. Now working as a curator, Alla shifted her focus to Soviet sculpture, presenting to the public the exhibitions 17/37. Soviet Sculpture. Takeoff (2023) and Sergey Konenkov. 20th Century (2025).
Alla Esipovich-Roginskaya lives and works in St. Petersburg, remaining an influential figure in the city’s cultural life. In a sense, she has closed the circle by becoming the subject of her own “Portraits” column – the very project that launched her career as a photographer.
Maria Saltanova,
Senior Researcher, the State Russian Museum
PhD in Cultural Studies
Contacts
+7 812 969 84 30
alya.e@mail.ru
alya.e@mail.ru