26 October 2017

5373

Dead Russian soldier, photographed on the road to Monasterzhiska (Ukraine) in 1916 by Florence Farmborough (1887-1978). She was born and brought up in Buckinghamshire but went to live in Russia in 1908 and was a governess first in Kiev and then Moscow. In  1914  she began working as a nurse with the Red Cross and with the Imperial Russian army; she kept a diary and habitually took a large plate camera around with her, developing  and printing her plates while encamped with the Russian forces. Extracts from her diaries were used as the source material for her book, Nurse at the Russian Front, published in 1974