Alfred Fedetsky

Alfred Konstantinovich Fedetsky (Russian: Альфред Константинович Федецкий, 1857 — 21 July 1902) was a prominent Russian photographer and filmmaker. He authored numerous portraits of notable Russian people (Aivazovsky, Tchaikovsky, John of Kronstadt, among many others) as well as members of the Imperial family. He was the personal photographer of Duchess Alexandra Petrovna of Oldenburg. Alfred Fedetsky was born in 1857 in Zhitomir, Volhynian Governorate (now Ukraine), into a family of Polish origin. After graduating from the Imperial Photographic Institute at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, he moved to the Kiev Governorate in 1880. Six years later he moved once again, to Kharkov. His teacher as well as his spiritual mentor was the photographer Włodzimierz Wysocki, a fellow Russian photographer of Polish origin who held the position of photographer of the Court of Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Alexandra Petrovna. Working mostly in Kharkov, Fedetsky was also a pioneering cinematographer. He is credited with being the first Russian to shoot a film (the Belgian Camille Cerf preceded him by four months, filming the coronation of Czar Nicholas II at the Kremlin in May 1896) called "The Grand Transfer of the Ozeryanskaya Icon from the Kuryazh Monastery to Kharkov, on 20 September 1896". In July 1902 Alfred Fedetsky died in Minsk. On the 26th of July, he was buried in the Cemetery of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, in a family crypt next to his wife.