Karl Fischer (photographer)

MuseumArt, while giving the date of birth as 1859, elsewhere suggests that it might have been 1847, and cites the Saratov Governorate Imperial archives, according to which he owned a photography salon in Saratov in as early as 1863-1868, the official permission having been granted ("...to Karl Fischer, the citizen of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach") personally by the Governor Grigory Aksakov (the son of writer Sergey Aksakov).

[3] Fischer's vast artistic legacy includes series of portraits of Russian actors (among them Maria Ermolova, Ivan Moskvin, Vsevolod Meyerkhold), writers (Leo Tolstoy, Leonid Andreyev, Anton Chekhov) artists (Ilya Repin, Vasily Surikov, Mikhail Vrubel) and composers (Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergey Rakhmaninov).

[2] The famous Fischer Atelier at the Kuznetsky Bridge (1895-1915) in Moscow specialized also in architectural and historical photography which featured regularly in the magazines like Niva and Vsemirnaya Illustratsiya.

[3] In 1915, at the height of the jingoistic anti-German campaign in Russia, Fischer (then still a citizen of Prussia) was stripped of his Imperial honours.

It is known that in 1923 he handed all his photographs of Alexander Ostrovsky to Anna Golubkina, for her to use them in her work on the monument which years later would be placed by the Maly Theatre.