Banking history in photos: a photo album of the Oryol commercial bank of 1899

Introduction. This article focuses on the photo album of the Oryol Commercial Bank, prepared just after completion of the bank’s new building in 1899. The photographs show the interiors of the building as well as the bank’s top managers and employees at their desks. Materials and Methods. In this article, historical photography is used as a source of information about the Oryol Commercial Bank in the context of nineteenth-century banking history. Results. The bank commissioned the new building when the idea of an operational hall for its customers was finally accepted by bank building planners. For the Oryol Commercial Bank, the hall not only functioned as a place of business, but also was a symbol of the bank’s high status and public importance - although not all of its operations were mass in this period. An open work area (with a lack both of offices for employees and separate rooms for departments) indicates a simple management structure and a small number of employees. Discussion and Conclusions. This study shows that visual sources provide us images of the objects under investigation, which can be understood only taking into account the historical context - the reconstruction of which requires a bulk of written sources. However, there often are insufficient visual data for exact attribution of historical photographs. In this sense, visual sources are important for historical research not merely on their own, but rather as part of a broader corpus of available relevant materials.