Photographing Central Asia: from the periphery of the Russian empire to global presence
Quick overview
Berlin, Boston:
De Gruyter
(2022), viii, 431 pp., figures, tables, index
ISBN 978-3-11-075442-1 (print); 978-3-11-075446-9 (pdf)
CC BY-NC-ND
"The aim of this volume is to interpret photography as a specific tool that reifies reality, subjectively frames it, and fits it into various political, ideological, commercial, scientific, and artistic contexts. Without reducing the entire argument to the binary of ‘photography and power’, the authors reveal the different modes of seeing that involve distinct cultural norms, social practices, power relations, levels of technology, and networks for circulating photography, and that determined the manner of its (re)use in constructing various images of Central Asia. The volume demonstrates that photography was the cornerstone of imperial media governance and discourse construction in colonial Turkestan of the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The various cases show the complex mechanisms by which images of Turkestan were created, remembered, or forgotten from the nineteenth until the twenty-first century." (Publisher)
Contents
1 Introduction: “On the margins of the marginal” – Why are there so few specialists in Central Asian photography of the imperial and early Soviet period? / Svetlana Gorshenina, 1
I. PHOTOGRAPHY AND ORIENTALISMS
2 Picturing the Other, mapping the Self: Charles-Eugène de Ujfalvy’s anthropological and ethnographic photography in Russian Turkestan (1876–1881) / Felix de Montety, 39
3 Picturing “Russia’s Orient”: The peoples of Russian Turkestan through the lens of Samuil M. Dudin (1900–1902) / Laura Elias, 63
4 The photographic legacy of Alexander N. Samoilovich (1880–1938) / Anton Ikhsanov, 91
5 Hungarian orientalism as seen through the photographs of György Almásy’s second expedition to the Kazakh and Kyrgyz territories in 1906 / István Sántha, László Lajtai, 129
6 From Siberia to Turkestan: Semirechie in writings and photographs of Vasilii V. Sapozhnikov / Tatiana Saburova, 165
7 “Another Turkestan” of senator Konstantin von der Pahlen (1908–1909) and engineer Nikolai M. Shchapov (1911–1913) / Tatiana Kotiukova, 189
II. USING AND REUSING PHOTOGRAPHS
8 Pre-revolutionary postcards with views of Turkestan / Natalia À. Mozokhina, 217
9 The Aralsk and Kazalinsk regions in early twentieth-century postcard photography: How does it reflect the social history and modern transformation of the Aral Sea backwater? / Bruno De Cordier, 249
10 Max Penson: The rise of a Soviet photographer from the margins / Helena Holzberger, 267
11 The expeditions of the Academy for the History of Material Culture to Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s: An examination of its wellknown and unknown photographic collections / Natalia Lazarevskaia, Maria Medvedeva, 299
12 “Ethnographic types” in the photographs of Turkestan: Orientalism, nationalisms and the functioning of historical memory on Facebook pages (2017–2019) / Svetlana Gorshenina, 329
13 Afterword: Unmarginalising Central Asian Photography / Svetlana Gorshenina, Sergei Abashin, Bruno De Cordier, Tatiana Saburova, 399
I. PHOTOGRAPHY AND ORIENTALISMS
2 Picturing the Other, mapping the Self: Charles-Eugène de Ujfalvy’s anthropological and ethnographic photography in Russian Turkestan (1876–1881) / Felix de Montety, 39
3 Picturing “Russia’s Orient”: The peoples of Russian Turkestan through the lens of Samuil M. Dudin (1900–1902) / Laura Elias, 63
4 The photographic legacy of Alexander N. Samoilovich (1880–1938) / Anton Ikhsanov, 91
5 Hungarian orientalism as seen through the photographs of György Almásy’s second expedition to the Kazakh and Kyrgyz territories in 1906 / István Sántha, László Lajtai, 129
6 From Siberia to Turkestan: Semirechie in writings and photographs of Vasilii V. Sapozhnikov / Tatiana Saburova, 165
7 “Another Turkestan” of senator Konstantin von der Pahlen (1908–1909) and engineer Nikolai M. Shchapov (1911–1913) / Tatiana Kotiukova, 189
II. USING AND REUSING PHOTOGRAPHS
8 Pre-revolutionary postcards with views of Turkestan / Natalia À. Mozokhina, 217
9 The Aralsk and Kazalinsk regions in early twentieth-century postcard photography: How does it reflect the social history and modern transformation of the Aral Sea backwater? / Bruno De Cordier, 249
10 Max Penson: The rise of a Soviet photographer from the margins / Helena Holzberger, 267
11 The expeditions of the Academy for the History of Material Culture to Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s: An examination of its wellknown and unknown photographic collections / Natalia Lazarevskaia, Maria Medvedeva, 299
12 “Ethnographic types” in the photographs of Turkestan: Orientalism, nationalisms and the functioning of historical memory on Facebook pages (2017–2019) / Svetlana Gorshenina, 329
13 Afterword: Unmarginalising Central Asian Photography / Svetlana Gorshenina, Sergei Abashin, Bruno De Cordier, Tatiana Saburova, 399
