Karelin was one of the first Russian photographers that started off interior portrait genre. His ‘room groups’ were quite popular among his colleagues. While making ‘plot’ scenes, he refuses to include traditional 19th century shooting pavilion’s interiors into the photographs: no hand-drawn decorations, no monumental balustrades, no heavy draperies. Karelin only used real everyday scenes as a background of the “acts” due to his intuitive feeling of documentary naturalism.
The photographer was mainly interested in poetic sides of life, social contrasts were a rare part of his works, but some pictures also had folk characters depicted. The poetic direction Karelin chose for himself would later become a calling card of Dmitriev, Karelin’s colleague and apprentice.