Photographing Central Asia : : From the Periphery of the Russian Empire to Global Presence / / ed. by Svetlana Gorshenina, Sergei Abashin, Bruno De Cordier, Tatiana Saburova.

• MitwirkendeR: Abashin, Sergei,; De Cordier, Bruno,; Elias, Laura,; Gorshenina, Svetlana,; Holzberger, Helena,; Ikhsanov, Anton,; Kotiukova, Tatiana,; Lazarevskaia, Natalia,; Lóránd, Eötvös,; Medvedeva, Maria,; Montety, Felix de,; Mozokhina, Natalia А.,; Saburova, Tatiana,; Sántha, István,
• HerausgeberIn: Abashin, Sergei,; Cordier, Bruno De,; Gorshenina, Svetlana,; Saburova, Tatiana,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Series: Welten Süd- und Zentralasiens / Worlds of South and Inner Asia / Mondes de l'Asie du Sud et de l'Asie Centrale Ser.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (VIII, 431 p.)

This volume addresses new theoretical approaches in visual and memory studies that prompted to rethink of the photography of Russian Turkestan of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Attempts to relate the visual unknown documentations to postcolonial criticism also opened up new interpretive arenas, helping to decentralize the analysis of the history of photography. 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. The book should appeal to scholars of the Russian Empire and Central Asia; of history of photography and visual culture; of memory studies. It should be appropriate for use in upper-level undergraduate courses, and even a broader public.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- Note on transliteration -- 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? -- Part 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) -- 3 Picturing “Russia’s Orient”: The peoples of Russian Turkestan through the lens of Samuil M. Dudin (1900–1902) -- 4 The photographic legacy of Alexander N. Samoilovich (1880–1938) -- 5 Hungarian orientalism as seen through the photographs of György Almásy’s second expedition to the Kazakh and Kyrgyz territories in 1906 -- 6 From Siberia to Turkestan: Semirechie in writings and photographs of Vasilii V. Sapozhnikov -- 7 “Another Turkestan” of senator Konstantin von der Pahlen (1908–1909) and engineer Nikolai M. Shchapov (1911–1913) -- Part II: Using and reusing photographs -- 8 Pre-revolutionary postcards with views of Turkestan -- 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? -- 10 Max Penson: The rise of a Soviet photographer from the margins -- 11 The expeditions of the Academy for the History of Material Culture to Central Asia in the 1920s and 1930s: An examination of its well-known and unknown photographic collections -- 12 “Ethnographic types” in the photographs of Turkestan: Orientalism, nationalisms and the functioning of historical memory on Facebook pages (2017–2019) -- 13 Afterword: Unmarginalising Central Asian Photography -- List of figures and tables -- Geographic index -- Index nominum -- Index rerum