Karl Bulla

[3] After arriving in St. Petersburg, Bulla started to work as a delivery-boy in the firm Dupant that made and sold photography supplies.

Soon his responsibilities included handmaking (coating and sensitizing) of the photographic glass negative plates.

At the age of twenty Bulla opened a small factory producing "momentary dry bromine-gelatin plates".

Buying the readymade photographic materials was much more convenient than handmaking their own and soon Bulla's plates became popular, selling not only in St.Petersburg but across the whole Russian Empire.

In his advertisement, he wrote "The oldest photographer-illustrator Karl Bulla photographs for the illustrated magazines anything and anywhere without limits from the landscape or the building, indoor or outdoor day or night at the artificial light".

[2] Indeed, he photographed everything and anything: Life of Tsar family and assemblies of anti-government intelligentsia, stars of scene and manual workers, palaces and hostels for homeless, even such exotics as gay parties.

He lived a quiet life there, photographing the local ethnographic material and teaching Estonian boys the basics of photography until his death in 1929.

[3] Later Viktor Bulla made photographs of the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War.