In 1983 Brumfield,formerly a generalist of Slavic studies,established himself in the history of architecture with his first book,Gold in azure:one thousand years of Russian architecture. It was followed by The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (1991),Russian housing in the modern age:design and social history (1993),A History of Russian Architecture (1993,Notable Book of that year[4] and a best seller[5] according to The New York Times),Lost Russia:Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture (1995),Landmarks of Russian Architecture:A Photographic Survey (1997) and Commerce in Russian urban culture:1861-1914 (English edition 2001,Russian edition 2000).
In 1986 Brumfield organized the first exhibit of photographic prints from the Prokudin-Gorsky Collection at the Library of Congress.[6] Since that time Brumfield has been actively engaged in the study of Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs,including several publications for the site "Russia Beyond the Headlines".[7]
Brumfield lived in the former Soviet Union and Russia for a total of fifteen years,[8] doing postgraduate research with Moscow State University and Saint Petersburg State University,[8] but mostly travelling through the northern country,surveying and photographing the surviving relics of vernacular architecture.[3] In a 2005 interview Brumfield,asked to tell which of those journeys stood out,picked a photo survey of Varzuga,a remote village connected to civilization by 150 kilometers of a sandy clay track.[9] Brumfield donated a collection of around 1,100 photographs of northern Russian and Siberian architecture taken in 1999–2003 to the Library of Congress.[10] Part of his archive was digitized with assistance of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Washington Library.[8] The basic collection of Brumfield's photographic work is held in the Department of Images Collections at the National Gallery of Art,Washington,DC. The William C. Brumfield Collection at the National Gallery of Art consists of 12,500 black-and-white 8" x 10" photographic prints,40,000 negatives and over 89,000 digital files,most of which are in color (nearly 149,000 in total).[11][12][13]
Brumfield's fellowship support began in 1966–67 with a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship (University of California,Berkeley). In 1992–93 Brumfield was NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) Fellow at the National Humanities Center. In 2001-02 he received an American Councils/National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Fellowship. Additional fellowship and research support was provided by the International Research and Exchanges Board (1971–72,1983–84,1992),the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Woodrow Wilson Institute (1983,1989),the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (1999–2000),and the Trust for Mutual Understanding (2001) among others.
In 2014 the D. S. Likhachev Foundation in St. Petersburg awarded Brumfield the D. S. Likhachev Prize "for outstanding contributions to the preservation of the historic and cultural heritage of Russia."[14][15]
In 2019 Brumfield was awarded the Order of Friendship,“for the merits in strengthening friendship and cooperation between peoples,fruitful activities for the rapprochement and mutual enrichment of cultures of nations and nationalities.”[16][17][18]
In 2021 Brumfield launched a virtual exhibition entitled "Lost America," which is based on photography done in the United States primarily in the 1970s.[19] These photographs represent an essential part of Brumfield's development as an artist,and they are the basis of an exhibition in July–August 2023 at the A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture,Russia's preeminent museum devoted to the study and documentation of architecture.[20] The project is featured in an accompanying book entitled Lost America.[21]
Brumfield's first exhibit at the Shchusev State Museum,"The Russian North. The Witness of William Brumfield",opened on September 5,2001. The exhibit consisted of several rooms devoted to Brumfield's photographic work in the historic Russian north (the region around the White Sea).[22][23]
Brumfield returned to the Shchusev with the exhibition "The Russian avant garde through the lens of an American photographer:Celebrating the Jubilee of William Brumfield". The exhibit displays some 330 of Brumfield's photographs of avant garde architecture in the USSR from the 1920s and 1930s. Taken between 1971 and 2019,the photographs range from St. Petersburg (Leningrad) to Khabarovsk.[24]
The exhibition "Avant-garde Architecture of the Soviet Era:Photography by William Brumfield" is on view at The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis from June 13 through October 14,2025.
Following the success of the Shchusev show,a major exhibit of Brumfield's photographs opened on June 13,2025 at The Museum of Russian Art (TMORA) in Minneapolis. Entitled "Avant-garde Architecture of the Soviet Era:Photography by William Brumfield",the show occupies the entire upper gallery space and will be on display until October 14. [25]
Publications
Portrait of William Brumfield by Zoya Zhilkina
Gold in Azure:One Thousand Years of Russian Architecture. Boston:David Godine,1983.
The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture. Berkeley:University of California Press,1991.
A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge University Press,1993. This book was a New York Times "Notable Book of the Year" in 1993
A History of Russian Architecture,second edition. University of Washington Press,2004
Lost Russia:Photographing the Ruins of Russian Architecture. Duke University Press,1995.
Landmarks of Russian Architecture:A Photographic Survey. Gordon and Breach,1997.
Architecture at the End of the Earth:Photographing the Russian North. Duke University Press,2015.
Journeys through the Russian Empire:The Photographic Legacy of Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky. Duke University Press,2020.
Russian Avant-Garde through the Lens of William Brumfield: Honoring the Master's 80 Years («Русский авангард в объективе Уильяма Брумфилда: К 80-летию мастера»). Moscow: Tri Kvadrata, 2024. Text in Russian and English. ISBN978-5-94607-273-1
From Forest to Steppe:The Russian Art of Building in Wood ISBN978-1-4780-2824-6 Duke University Press, 2025
Editor and co-author:
Reshaping Russian Architecture: Western Technology, Utopian Dreams. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Commerce in Russian Urban Culture, 1861–1914. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
With financial support from the Kennan Institute, the publisher «Три квадрата» (Tri Kvadrata) began in 2005 to release the series Открывая Россию/Discovering Russia by Brumfield:
Totma: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (Moscow, 2005)
Irkutsk: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2006)
Tobolsk: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2006)
Solikamsk: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2007)
Cherdyn: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2007)
Kargopol: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2007)
Chita: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2008)
Buriatiia: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2008)
Solovki: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2008)
Kolomna: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2009)
Suzdal: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2009)
Torzhok: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2010)
Usol'e: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2012)
Smolensk: Architectural Heritage in Photographs (2014)
Chukhloma Region: Architectural Heritage in Photographs = Чухломский край: архитектурное наследие в фотографиях (Moscow, 2016; Discovering Russia, issue 15). ISBN978-5-94607-208-3
Pereslavl-Zalesskii: Architectural Heritage in Photographs = Переславль-Залесский: архитектурное наследие в фотографиях (Moscow, 2018; Discovering Russia, issue 16). ISBN978-5-94607-222-9
Ekaterinburg: Architectural Heritage in Photographs = Екатеринбург: архитектурное наследие в фотографиях (Moscow, 2023; Discovering Russia, issue 17). ISBN978-5-94607-265-6
With financial support from the "Vologodskie Zori" Fund (Vologda, Russia), the publisher «Три квадрата» (Tri Kvadrata) began in 2005 to release the Vologda series by Brumfield on the architectural heritage of the Vologda region:
Vologda Album (2005)
Velikii Ustiug (2007)
Kirillov. Ferapontovo (2009)
Ustiuzhna (2010)
Belozersk (2011)
Vologda (2012)
Cherepovets: Architectural Heritage of the Cherepovets Region, Moscow: Tri Kvadrata Publishers, 2017, ISBN978-5-94607-218-2 .
Electronic photographic collections
Russian North (36,000 images, primarily Russian North and Siberia)
Brumfield, William С. (2014), "Sleptsov Redivivus", Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie, 11 (2): 357–389, archived from the original on 13 September 2014, retrieved 24 September 2014.
Brumfield, William С. (2015), "From Victor Hugo to Fedor Dostoevskii: 19th-Century Perceptions of Architecture as Historical Text", Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, 8 (6): 1026–1036, doi:10.17516/1997-1370-2015-8-6-1026-1036.
Brumfield, William С. (2016), "New Directions in Russian Orthodox Church Architecture at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century", Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, 9 (1): 5–40, doi:10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-1-5-40.
Brumfield, William С. (2016), "Thérèse philosophe and Dostoevsky's Critique of Rational Egotism", Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie, 13 (1): 304–317, doi:10.17805/zpu.2016.1.28.
Brumfield, William С. (2016), "Eastern Motifs in the Ornamentation of Eighteenth-Century Siberian Church Architecture", Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, 9 (4): 745–774, doi:10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-4-745-774.
Guseinova, I.A.; Brumfield, W.С. (2016), "Russian Folklore as a Poetics of Inference: (Based on Material from the Fairytale by Leonid Filatov "Fedot the Musketeer, a Brave Lad")", Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, 9 (9): 2223–2230, doi:10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-9-2223-2230.
Brumfield, William С. (2016), "America as a Representation of Modernity in the Russian Architectural Press, 1870–1917", Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie, 13 (3): 132–146, doi:10.17805/zpu.2016.3.11.
Brumfield, William С. (2016), "Style Moderne and the Rediscovery of the Wooden Architecture of the Russian North: The Photographic Connection", Journal of Siberian Federal University. Humanities & Social Sciences, 9 (10): 2383–2397, doi:10.17516/1997-1370-2016-9-10-2383-2397.
Brumfield, William С. (2017), "Yurii Gagarin and My Launch into Space"(PDF), Vestnik of Moscow State Linguistic University. Series: Humanitarian Sciences, 2 (769): 106–112, archived(PDF) from the original on 21 May 2017, retrieved 21 May 2017.
Brumfield, W.С. (2016), "Faded Glory in Full Color: Russia's Architectural History (Interview with William Craft Brumfield)", Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 17 (2): 379–404, doi:10.1353/kri.2016.0031, S2CID159806547 .
Glushchenko, N. D. (2017), "Discovering Russia: The Books of William Brumfield about Russian Architecture", Znanie. Ponimanie. Umenie, 14 (4): 257–266, doi:10.17805/zpu.2017.4.23.
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