Multicontour

Since the early 1970s, Drachinsky returned to his personal artistic practice and devoted himself to it entirely. His earlier work on exhibitions that incorporated contemporary technical materials — including projections and color slides — in order to heighten the emotional impact of photography in the exhibition space, led Nikolai Ivanovich to experiment with color projections of his own images. In the three years between his retirement and his death, Drachinsky developed an innovative technique for creating color images from black-and-white photographs — a process he called Multicontour.
Using this method, Drachinsky created a collection of more than 200 works, most of them based on his color photographs of Moscow.

Drachinsky’s color compositions mark a new chapter in modern photography. They present the artist’s subjective reality, shaped exclusively through technical manipulation of the original image — in many ways, a form of digital photography before the digital era.

At the same time, these Multicontour works capture Moscow of the 1960s and 1970s, reflecting the spirit of the time: the construction of New Arbat and the rise of modern minimalist architecture; the visual “junctions” in the urban fabric where ancient monuments, parks, and new developments coexist.

The visual language of the Multicontour series unmistakably resonates with the artistic sensibility of the 1970s — characterized by a fascination with abstraction, concise composition, and a vivid, saturated palette. Drachinsky’s manipulation of scale within the image (a flower larger than a building, for instance) transforms familiar reality into a newly authored vision of the world.

All Photos: Nikolay Drachinsky © 2025 Estate of Nikolay Drachinsky