We don’t know who he or she was. We just have photographs, just a handful, in one of the collections held at the Krasnoyarsk Krai Museum of Regional History and Folklife at Dubrovinskogo St., 84, Krasnoyarsk in Russia.
2 of the photographs are separate hotel fires.
The majority of the rest are scenes at the spa resort of Lake Shira. Perhaps they were taken on a vacation Vonago took with a friend (the same man appears in a few of the images). Lake Shira is an unusual lake in that it’s an extraordiarily rare meromictic lake (one in which, unlike your average lake, the water layers do not mix).
Since there’s precious little left to say about L. Lu Vonago, before looking at his work, it’s well worth a quick look at the museum that looks after his photographs.
In 1916, someone had the idea and the balls to build the Krasnoyarsk Museum of Local Lore on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere at the turn of the century in the style of an Egyptian pharoah’s tomb. It’s still there, still looking like the building that didn’t get the dress code memo, over a century later.
L. Lu Vonago, 2 Hotels on Fire, Krasnoyarsk, 1900 :
L. Lu Vonago, Lake Shira Resort, 1901 :
Kumis is a fermented dairy product traditionally made from mare’s milk or donkey milk. The drink remains important to the peoples of the Central Asian steppes, of Huno-Bulgar, Turkic and Mongol origin: Kazakhs, Bashkirs, Kalmyks, Kyrgyz, Mongols, and Yakuts. (wiki).
