Pavlov

IVAN P. PAVLOV (2005) 

In the summer of 2005, three other family members and I traveled to Russia to pick up the threads of my father's and Ivan P. Pavlov's lives. In preparation, I looked through the casually stored negatives of Pavlov, which my father had taken 80+ years earlier. I was stunned by their beauty, their historical and artistic significance. The Singer Editions prints capture what my father's scientific eye saw. Most of these images had never been seen.  

A sample collection is on permanent exhibition in St. Petersburg at the Pavlovian Memorial Museum. As well, the Pavlovian Scholarly Society in St Petersburg has a sample collection on which they published an article in, "The Russian Journal of Physiology," January 2006.  

A complete set also resides with, "The W. Horsley Gantt Papers of The Alan Chesney Medical Archives" at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore, Maryland. 

In 1922, my father, W. Horsley Gantt, a young American doctor, went to Russia, as Chief of Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration's unit in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). While there, he met and worked in Pavlov's lab, 1922-23; 1925-29, at which point he was hired by Adolph Meyer at Johns Hopkins to be on the psychiatric staff and where he set up The Pavlovian Laboratory. 

The extraordinary intimacy of these images is a tribute to my father's and Pavlov's close relationship, which continued until Pavlov's death in 1936.