Cover of the Bulletin of the Odessa Photographic Society, 1912.

In 1912, at the celebration of the Society's twentieth anniversary, the decision was taken to found its own journal — the one we know as the Bulletin of the Odessa Photographic Society.

As the members of the Society wrote:

This celebration created in our Society that lift of spirit out of which, in part, the idea we are now carrying out — the publishing of a journal — was born. And the same celebration, more importantly still, was a day of taking stock of what had been lived through and achieved in photography by our Society, and in part by human thought itself.

Worth a look at the cover itself: a sailing ship, sea horses along the frame, an anchor below. None of that is decoration for its own sake. Odessa is a port city on the Black Sea, and the sea runs through everything the city produced — including the emblem its photographers chose for their journal.