In 1887, a year before George Eastman introduced roll film to the world, Countess Sophia Tolstoy purchased a Kodak large-format camera. Her purpose was to photograph her husband, the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, for posterity. She quickly mastered the camera, which shot individual 5x7-inch glass-plate negatives, and she began carrying it around with her in a special road basket. This was less than 50 years after the first daguerreotypes had been unveiled in Paris. Though the Kodak box camera would soon shift photography's paradigm, Sophia's equipment made taking pictures physically difficult and aesthetically insecure. Yet she was undaunted by that challenge.
Sophia had tried photography once before. Twenty-seven years earlier, at the age of 16, she had dabbled in the medium for a summer. It had been necessary then to use the messy wet-plate collodion process, which required the photographer to hand-coat a sheet of glass with light-sensitive liquid emulsion and expose it in the camera before it was dry. It wasn't easy to get everything right. Sophia photographed her family and friends that summer, and while none of those pictures survives, it's clear that something drew her to the medium long before she came up with her documentary mission.
When Sophia took up photography again in 1887, the factory-coated dry plate had come along; though this simplified the technique, she had to learn photography all over again. She developed her glass negatives under a dark attic staircase in the family house, then made contact prints on the terrace outside. After a long exposure to daylight caused the negative's image to appear as a developed positive on the 'printing out' paper it was pressed against, Sophia would fix and wash the prints, then stick them onto a window. They fell off when they were dry.
Though Sophia was dedicated to photographing her husband, she soon became her own most enduring subject. She found a way to express herself directly in her self-portraits, looking inward, not only outward. When she took pictures, she was without her usual concern for the opinions of the scores of strong people in her life. She photographed herself unsentimentally, romantically, playfully, in clothes her husband detested, and in poses and compositions that were experimental and uninhibited for her day. She often included one or more other important people in her life, including husband Leo, in these images of herself.
Self-portraiture was common in painting and other visual arts in those years, but it was rare in photography. The reason was at least partly technical. Remote control was awkward, if not impossible, and having somebody nearby to expose the plate when the moment was right was inconvenient and inhibiting for most photographers.
This was not so for Sophia. She felt at ease with family and friends who were nearby while she was photographing, and she asked any who came along at the right time to make the exposure. She didn't keep a record of who actually operated the camera for any given picture. It just wasn't important to her.
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