Copyright 2006 by Kate Fitz Gibbon
Emirate and Empire: Photography
in Central Asia 1858 – 1917
The camera was one of the most rapidly distributed tools ever
constructed. Within just a few months of the announcement of its invention in
England and France, the camera could be found in the capitals of Europe, in the
Americas, Africa, Australia, and the Near and Far East. The camera accompanied
virtually all subsequent journeys of exploration and became - almost instantly
- the public record of the progress of empire around the world.1
The introduction of photography into Central Asia came about as a
result of the Russian conquest of the region. (For the purpose of this paper,
the term “Central Asia” refers to the territory of Russian Turkestan,
encompassing the present countries of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan,
it does not include Tibet or Eastern Turkestan, the present day Xinjiang
Province of China.) Nineteenth century Central
Asia had fallen far from its earlier position as a major military power, trade
hub, and center of artistic and intellectual activity in the Islamic world. For
more than two centuries, dynastic feuds had rocked the country, leaving it
impoverished and the roads unprotected. The caravan trade, already pressured by
the increasing use of sea routes for the transportation of goods, had
faltered. In the early nineteenth
century, three independent kingdoms were established by Uzbek rulers in
southern Central Asia: the Khanates of Khiva, Bukhara, and Khojand. Slave-based
agriculture expanded, trade increased, and new demands for luxury goods brought
about an artistic revival of traditional crafts.
At about the same time, anxiety over increasing British activity in
Afghanistan propelled Tsarist Russian commercial and military interests to look
towards Central Asia, hoping to find a bulwark against British influence along
their southern borders, a colonial marketplace in which Russian goods could
compete and a rich source of raw materials, particularly cotton.
Tsar Nicolas I had died in 1855, as Russian society was reeling from the
defeats suffered in the Crimea against the French, British, and Ottoman Turks.
The new Tsar Alexander II reopened Russia’s borders and permitted European
travel and a fresh influx of progressive European social ideas and entrepreneurial
energy. Although
the Great Game in Central Asia was justified publicly as a geopolitical
conflict between Russia and Great Britain for strategic lands, the realities
were more prosaic. Influential
businessmen determined to expand Russian markets and a military aristocracy
with imperial ambitions found common interest in the subjugation of the
Caucasus and Central Asia. Together, they convinced the Tsar to move forward
with direct military action. Soon after 1850, a series of hard-fought
battles brought Russian troops across the Kazakh plains, and between 1865 and
1884, Russian forces took complete political control of the oases towns, with
the Emir of Bukhara alone retaining a nominal local sovereignty.
The arrival of photographers in Central Asia roughly paralleled the
arrival of Russian troops and Russian administrators. The centers of
photographic activity were the Russian held towns of Khojand and Samarkand, and
the administrative city of Tashkent. Prior to the Russian conquest, only a few travelers
had come to the oasis towns. Even if they had the ability and the desire to do
so, taking photographs would have excited the suspicions and the animus of the
local rulers. The earliest photography in Central Asia begins in 1858. Only
after 1870, when Russia’s hold on Central Asia was certain, does it become
widespread.
Like other colonial powers,
Russia’s rulers wished to document their new possessions and to join in the
movement to photograph the entire world. The imperial imagination was fired by
the prospect of documenting the ancient cultures of the Silk Road, from the
ancient monuments of Samarkand to the ordinary rituals of daily life of the
inhabitants of the steppe.
Russian photography in Central Asia was similar in many respects to the
colonial documentary projects of the British in India and the French in North
Africa. The first photographers in Central Asia were foreigners, and the
cataloging of the peoples, sights, and architecture of the region utilized the
ethnological approach popular at the time. Technical innovations made
international photography possible at approximately the same time that
anthropology emerged as a science. This was also the period during which rapid
industrialization in Europe and North America gave new emphasis to the
“other-ness” and cultural differences between technologically developed and
non-developed peoples.
In its simplest form, the ethnological perspective focused on
categorizing and identifying ethnic types. People were grouped by race, tribe,
religion, occupation, physical characteristics, and gender. Objects of material
culture were categorized by name, function, period, and construction material
or decorative ornament. Virtually all photographers of empire adopted a more or
less rigid anthropological framework through which to order their work. Because
print photography enabled the rapid copying and distribution of images, the
anthropological and ethnological perspective of photography strongly influenced
not only the way that each nation viewed the rest of the world, but also the
way that they saw themselves.2
Some writers interpret colonial period photo-documentation as
expressing possession: the photographers, in a sense, owned their subjects
through the process of describing them. 3 Others see photography as
the desire to capture a record of primitive cultures, doomed to disappear as a
result of contact with the civilizing influence of the conqueror. 4 Early photographs may also
have carried a message that stands in counterpoint to the dominant/submissive
political paradigm; they established parallels between the daily lives of
colonizers and colonized in photographs of weddings, funerals, and other
religious, social, and domestic activities common to both societies.
Photographs depicting poverty and ignorance could carry a dual message - both a
perceived need for social progress and a justification for colonial
interference. The most popular and widely disseminated types of photographs
from Russia’s colonial empire, however, were entertaining and decorative. They
provided a pleasurable experience for the viewer. These photographs celebrated
an Orientalist romanticism and heroic barbarism that many Russians saw as a
titillating, dramatic, and exciting part of the Russian past, as Russia’s
history had been deeply intertwined with that of Mongol and Turkic peoples to
the East.
French and British Imperial documentary projects attempted a scientific
and detached perspective of foreign subjects, but each viewed conquered peoples
through a different cultural lens. 5 Russia had a far more
equivocal relationship with Central Asia than other colonizers whose homes were
historically unconnected with colonized peoples. Russians saw themselves as
holding a more highly developed, paternal position in the Greater Russian
region. The geographic proximity of
Central Asia lent their relationship a familial character, at least in Russian
eyes. Many Russians also suffered at the same time from a sense of
inferiority to Europeans, who looked on the Russians themselves as barbarous
and who rather indiscreetly patronized them. Russians felt a need to prove
themselves equal to other nations with aspirations to empire.
A further complication arose from Russia’s early history of subjugation
to Mongol and Central Asian peoples. This history gave rise to an almost
subconscious belief that if Central Asians were not dominated, they might
seriously threaten Russia. A fear of violent, precipitate upheaval remained an
unspoken subtext beneath the economic and political rationale for conquest of
the Central Asian region, and throughout the early colonial period, the
determined resistance of some Central Asian groups to Russian suzerainty made
this threat seem more real.
Russia’s imperial program was more pragmatically justified by Russian
industry’s need for Central Asian raw materials such as cotton, and for a
captive market for Russian manufactures. However, since Central Asia could not
compare in resources or market size to India, North Africa, or the Far East,
the economic rewards derived from colonization were disappointingly small.
Overall, there were a great many contradictory elements within the colonialist
paradigm between Russia and Central Asia that are reflected in various ways in
the photography of the period.
Photography in Central Asia began at a time of great ferment in the
world of Russian art as well as the worlds of politics and commerce. Since the late eighteenth century, artistic
training had been centered on the Russian Academy. For the most part, Russians
were provincial, suspicious of novelty in art, and adhered to a rigid social
hierarchy. Russian artists held a relatively low social status and because
their training was based upon the copying of European models their work often
represented craftsmanship as much as artistic creativity.
In the 1860s, all this changed. Many artists strove to express socially
responsible or politically progressive ideas in painting and rejected the
traditional neo-Classical style of the Russian Academy. Although the
aristocracy and the Tsarist administration continued to see their world as
immutable and unchanging, Russian society was in reality in turmoil. The 1861 emancipation of the serfs had
created tremendous hardship, displacement of landless rural peoples, and
famine. The beginnings of industrialization created a new class of worker who
had low social status and often lived in abysmal conditions. Russian artists
sought to portray contemporary society as it really was, rather than through
romanticized, Classic forms. The Russian
Realist painters depicted humble subjects in non-idealized surroundings. They
traveled through the countryside to find their subjects and exhibited paintings
in rural villages. The Peredvizhniki or Itinerant group of artists called for
nothing less than the transformation of society by bringing art to the masses. 6
Photography contributed to the dialog on the goals of art. Many artists
saw photography as a natural extension of the existing visual arts. The first
photographs were based on the same artistic conventions, subjects, and genres
as academic painting. Many early photographers had previously been painters or
alternated working in both professions. The Russian term “svetopis,” or
light-painting, was used commonly as a synonym for the word “fotografia,”
photography. The use of photography to express new artistic ideas encouraged an
even greater interchange between the worlds of photography and art. Realism not
only meant precise reproduction of what was before the artist, it required that
he step back from the subject, refrain from altering and aestheticizing it, and
instead, seek to bring out its meaning through context. In theory at least,
photographs could provide a neutral visual perspective, flattening the scene
and treating everything within view of the lens equally.
A number of important artists in the Peredvizhniki
group worked in photography as well as in traditional artistic media. Ivan
Kramskoi, a founding member, had begun his career as a retoucher in a
photographer’s studio. S. M. Dudin, a young painter and follower of Ilya Repin
and the Itinerants, would become the most important Central Asian photographer
of the turn of the century. William Carrick, a Scotsman living in St.
Petersburg who was an early and influential photographer of Russian genre
scenes, had trained as a painter. Carrick’s studio photographed the work of
painters for reproduction, working with Vladimir Stasov of the Imperial Public
Library (who was also a critic who supported the Realist movement). 7 There was not only intense
interest in the art world in the technological contributions that photography
could make to art as a visual aid, but an immediate inclusion of photography
and photographic artists within the artistic milieu.
The question remains whether as painting and photography became more
“realistic” and “truthful,” they also became more susceptible to being used as
propaganda to carry a deliberate political or social message unrelated to the
formal concerns of art. Just as there was ambiguity between “self” and “other”
in Russia’s vision of Central Asia, the line between real and unreal in the
world of art also became difficult to draw. The debates that existed in Europe
over the relationship between fidelity to nature and artifice in photography
were also crucial in the Russian discussion. Artists and critics, especially
those of the Realist school, were excited by photography’s ability to
contextualize the subject, establish an exact relationship between subject and
surroundings and to precisely capture the moment. Photography offered Realism
in a form that met exactly Russian society’s need to define itself. However,
the first excitement over photography’s ostensible ability to show absolute
truth was quickly tempered by the realization that the photographer not only
chose the content but also controlled the message through manipulation of the
lens, lighting or other factors. Artists and critics understood that the same
image could also convey a very different impression to different viewers.
There remained, of course, many questions
about whether or not photography was art. In Europe and the United States, the
dramatic successes of new technologies and striking and innovative visual
approaches by self-proclaimed photo artists tended to bolster hyperbolic claims
of the invention of a new art form. In Russia, the general public perception of
photography as art lagged a little behind, but Russian artists embraced
photography immediately as a tool that was part of the artistic process.
Although photography came relatively late to Central Asia, the crucial
arguments over the nature and value of photography as an art form were
important there as well. Over time, and in the hands of different
photographers, photography in Central Asia demonstrates the changing role of
photography as documentary form, as art, as a transmitter of specific message,
and a means of linking and initiating a dialog between photograph and viewer.
The history of photography in Central Asia was determined by many factors: the politics
behind major photographic commissions, photography’s sudden commercial
popularity, and the public’s changing ideas about the importance of having
photographic documentation of the major (and soon even the trivial) events of
their lives.
Especially in Imperial era photography, there is a constant tension
between different, sometimes overlapping “messages” in Central Asian
photography. These include
1) An Orientalizing program that stereotypes and barbarizes Central
Asian peoples by presenting them as noble but childlike or else ruled by
debased passions,
2) An ethnological or archaeological perspective that fixes Central
Asia in time, usually showing a moribund region of crumbling architecture and
people in stasis,
3) A results-oriented perspective that depicts the modernization
achieved through Russian conquest and domination, and
4) Last and least often, a socially progressive desire to elucidate a
“human” condition and to encourage a feeling of identity between the subject of
the photograph and the viewer.
A photograph could present any one of these messages singly, or meld
them together. The malleability of the ‘true picture’ of colonial period
Central Asia as it is depicted in photography is particularly poignant in
Russian society, in which there was an overt conjunction between ‘truth’ and
official ideology. As the history of photography is explored in greater detail,
each of these perspectives comes into play in the hands of different
photographers and at different times.
Photography
Begins in Russia, 1839
The form and content of photography in
Central Asia reflected the dramatic economic, social, and cultural changes that
took place in Russia during the final half-century of tsarist rule. A brief
introduction to the early history of photography in Russia is therefore
essential to understanding the forms that photography took when it first
arrived in Central Asia.
Serious interest in photography came first
from the scientific academies, in an atmosphere of disinterested study. The
announcement of Daguerre’s discoveries in Paris and Fox Talbot’s in London in
early 1839 was followed immediately by articles in the Russian press. 8
I. Hammel of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences was sent to England and
France to gather information and equipment about the new processes. Hammel met
with Fox Talbot, Daguerre, and Isidore Niepce. He secured a camera and other
equipment before they were available on the market and worked directly with
Niepce to produce prints 9 Initially,
the scientific establishment saw photography’s primary role as form of
documentation enabling an exact reproduction. Russian scientists engaged in
experiments in order to determine the photographic process best suited to this
sort of documentation, and the Academy of Sciences commissioned a chemist,
Julius Fritzsche to try and improve on Talbot’s process.
10 There were extensive debates in the Russian press over the relative merits of
the daguerreotype and paper printing processes from 1839 onwards. The arrival
of photographic equipment in Russia was followed rapidly by this and other
experimentation with both daguerreotype and paper printing, and resulted in
some notable discoveries by Russian chemists, including new fixatives and
later, a resin based, flexible film. 11
Artistic and commercial photographic interests rapidly eclipsed the
documentary aims of Russian scientists. Aleksei
Grekov established the first commercial photographic studio in Moscow in 1840.
Many others followed Grekov’s lead. The commercial photography scene was at
first dominated by foreign photographers, but by 1860 the vast majority of
studio photographers were Russians. By mid-century, travelers to Russia (many
carrying cameras with them to record their journeys) remarked on the number of
photographic studios in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Despite the proliferation of
photographers, European researches remained dominant, and even as late as 1896,
almost all photographic and developing supplies found in Russia were imported. 12
For the traditional portraitist, studio photography allowed the
creation of a formal, controlled environment in which subtle adjustments of
pose and lighting could achieve the effects desired by the sitter,
commissioner, or artist. Portraiture was the most common form taken by
photography in its early years. By 1857, when Sergei Levitsky made indoor
portraiture possible with the first successful use of electric lighting, a
major barrier was eliminated for photography. 13
The second most popular subject of photography became the “view,” an
architectural or landscape photograph capturing a quintessential moment of
beauty, drama, or natural grandeur. The quest for dramatic landscapes required
that photographers take their equipment out of the major towns, and enabled the
collection of portraits of country peoples as well as places. For the
documentary artist, intent on capturing a true picture, the photographic image
brought a new weight and validity to the rendering of a specific moment as well
as providing an accurate rendering of placement, light, and shadow.
In photographing the exotic – characterized by timelessness rather than
specificity - photography captured the extreme detail that made the exotic seem
more real. The first ethnographic photography in Russia was made of ethnic
“types” of peasants, Cossacks, and street vendors, much of it initially done in
studios with country-style props of household goods and tools. Such Russian
“types” proved extremely popular photographs for sale and photographers began
to travel widely, primarily along river routes, to collect images of country
life. Beginning in the regions near to central Russia, photographers fanned out
into the Novgorod region, Finland, the Ukraine and then into the Caucasus and
Siberia. Gradually, more empathetic portraits began to be made, as photography
began, along with literature and painting, to expose glaring social inequities
in the face of administrative indifference towards the close of the century.
The public took little interest in theorizing or in arguments over
Truth in Art or photography’s relationship to painting. They were simply wildly
enthusiastic about everything to do with photography. The public flocked to
exhibitions and displays, which began with a showing of the work of both
Daguerre and Fox Talbot at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art in 1939. 14 The middle and upper classes
demanded to have their portraits done, exchanged cartes de visite, and
purchased photographs of famous, beautiful, or faraway people, monuments, or
views to decorate their walls and fill their personal photo albums.
Large-scale exhibitions were extremely
popular in Russia and Europe, and Russian photographers first received prizes
in the 1865 International Photographic Exhibition in Berlin. 15
During the last decades of the nineteenth century, International Expositions in
England and France became monumental, extravagant celebrations of Empire. The
fairs were an opportunity to market products, show off new technologies, and
display new colonial “acquisitions.” While large numbers of Russian
ethnographic photographs prepared for exhibitions remained in Europe, 16
even more were preserved in official collections that included dozens of large
albums of ethnographic images stored in the Russian Ethnological Museum,
Kunstkammer, the Institute of Material Culture in St. Petersburg, and the
Oriental Museum in Moscow. In 1899, the First Turkestanian Photographic
Exhibition was held in Tashkent. 17 Major exhibitions that featured collections of materials from Central Asia and
may also have included photographs include the Turkestan Departments of the
All-Russian Manufactures Exhibition of 1870, the Moscow All-Russian
Polytechnical Exhibition of 1872, the Universal Exhibition of 1872 in Vienna,
the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1900, and the 1904 International Exposition in
St. Louis in the United States. 18
There was also extensive private collecting
of photographs as souvenirs by families who served the empire. These private
albums held family photographs and official portraits - particularly of
military officers, and often included numerous photographs with “ethnographic”
subjects that were produced in series by commercial photographers who had
studios in Central Asia. These albums and loose photographs were collected for
display in Russian homes along with weapons, carpets, embroideries, and other
popular decorative arts. (This style not only evoked the atmosphere of empire,
it also added a bit of much needed romance to household decoration. It is
noteworthy that during much of the nineteenth century, it was fashionable among
Russians of rank to claim that ones ancestors included a Cossack, Tatar, or
even a Mongol or two.) The demand for photographs was met by even greater
numbers of photographers and photographic studios. The corps of photographers
in Moscow and St. Petersburg expanded and photographic studios appeared across
the Russian Empire, even in relatively small towns.
Photographic
Processes
Several different photographic processes were in use during the period
covered by this paper, from 1858 to 1917. As early as 1839, both daguerreotype
and early paper printing processes were in use in Russia, and as in many other
countries, daguerreotypes were more popular initially than paper printing
because of their greater detail and durability. Wet collodion glass plate negatives came into
common use in Russia by the 1850s. The wet plate collodion
process was the type most used in the early years of ethnographic photography.
It was more flexible and adaptable to long journeys than the daguerreotype
although it still required frequent stops for preparation and development. Identical prints could be
made in quantity.
Wet collodion glass plates were used by Murenko, by the photographers
who worked to produce the Turkestanskii Al’bom and other early Central Asian
photographers. The preparation and execution of photography in this technique
was difficult, especially when working in the field. The photographer dissolved
cellulose nitrate in ether, alcohol, and potassium iodide to make a clear,
flammable liquid called collodion. This was flowed onto a sheet of glass that
was the size of the finished print. The glass negatives used for many early
Central Asian photographs were generally only about four by five inches in size
or smaller, although much larger plates could be used. Often different size
cameras were used while traveling to obtain the different negatives. The
photographer applied the collodion to a glass plate, tilted the glass until the
entire surface was coated, plunged the plate into a bath of silver nitrate
which combined with the collodion to form light-sensitive silver iodide,
inserted it into a plate holder, exposed it in the camera and then developed it
before the collodion dried. Development required a silver bath, developer,
fixative, and varnish.[xix]
The gelatin dry plate glass negative was introduced in the 1870s and
was in general use by 1885. Thin glass plates were coated with a
light-sensitive gelatin emulsion that eliminated the need to prepare wet
collodion plates in the field. Dry plates were generally factory-made and could
be stored for months either before or after exposure, although Russian
expeditionary photographers in Central Asia could also have prepared their own
dry plates. (Although traveling photo artists like Paul Nadar, who represented
the Eastman Company in France, used film negatives in Central Asia as early as
the 1890s,[xx] the use of glass negatives
continued for an astonishingly long period in both Central Asia and during the
period of the Soviet Union. Glass negatives were still in use in Tashkent even
in the 1970s.)
The earliest Central Asian printed photographs are albumen prints. Very
thin printing paper was floated on beaten egg whites to make an albumen
coating. The paper was sensitized by being floated albumen side down in a tray
of 10% silver nitrate solution. The glossy albumen surface created a whole new
layer to form the silver image and could achieve a variety of image hues.
Processing an albumen print required exposure, washing, toning, fixing, and
washing again. Most silver printing papers, including albumen paper, were toned
in a solution containing gold chloride during the print processing, which
changed the image from reddish brown to purple or blue-black and gave it
greater stability. Very occasionally, cyanotype prints from the 1890s or early
twentieth century are found in Central Asia.
Gelatin silver prints, in which paper is coated with gelatin that
contains light sensitive silver salts, were introduced in the 1870s and quickly
became the most widespread printing process used throughout the world. Central
Asia often lagged far behind in technical advances, however, and it is common
to find albumen as well as gelatin silver prints from the 1880s and 1890s. The
last photo-process, the color negative process introduced by Prokudin-Gorskii
will be described in a section below.
In Russia, photo-retouching artists, who were
often professional painters, covered flaws in prints and a style of very
heavily over-painted printing that resembled painting became briefly popular.
Figures in the foreground of prints were sometimes varnished in order to create
the effect of depth present in a daguerreotype. Examples of these techniques
are not found in Central Asian photography, nor are cartes de visite, which
soon became as popular with the Russian elite as they were in other parts of
Europe. A few stereographic cards with albumen printed double-images of Central
Asian subjects have been found. These often appear to have been
hand-constructed and lack the precision and finish of European and American works.
Photo-lithography of works of art, monuments, and portraits of the
famous dramatically expanded the reach of photographs, but the most widely
distributed photographic images of Central Asia are found on printed postcards.
Russian
Conquest of Central Asia and the Beginning of Photographic Documentation
1858-1875
The earliest known photographs from Central Asia were made by
photographers who either served in the Russian military forces or who were
hired to accompany the general staff during the actual campaigns. The very first recorded photographer was
cannoneer sub-lieutenant Stepanovich Murenko (1837-1875). Murenko was a member
of Colonel Ignatieff’s 1858 mission to the Khivan Khanate to establish a
commercial treaty.[xxi] The young officer made
photographs in Khiva and Bukhara, and on his return to St. Petersburg gave an
album to the Imperial Russian Geographic Society, which presented him with a
silver medal in 1860.[xxii] Though few of Murenko’s
photographs remain, their subjects and their message are a distillation of the
essential elements of Russian conquest. [Fig. 1-3] The photographs include a
group portrait of Russian “captives” freed in 1858. Slavery was common in
Central Asia, but almost all slaves were of Shia Iranian background, taken by
Turkomans on raids into Persia. At times, Russians were captured from caravans
and ransomed or enslaved in Central Asia. They were free to live and marry in
the Khanates if they adopted the Muslim faith. In Russia, such enslaved
Christians were one of the most public and emotional cause celébres that
justified Russian conquest.[xxiii] The men in the photograph
are old – one has a stick. They are well dressed in Central Asian robes and sit
in traditional eastern posture; they look tired, a little confused, but at ease
with a local boy who leans over their shoulders. Another photograph, this one
of Kyrgyz chief Esat Kutebarov shows him seated in his yurt. He is dignified,
yet sad, as if he were contemplating the end of his rule – which indeed, would
soon take place. A group portrait of three Khivan gentlemen at a sociable
gathering prefigures the staged “ethnographic” portraits that would become
essential to the Orientalist oeuvre.
If Murenko’s portraits draw attention to the reasons for conquest –
both real and purported, the 1872 Turkestanskii Al’bom commissioned by
governor-general K. P. von Kaufman presents that conquest realized in full. The
Turkestanskii Al’bom is one of the most extraordinary photographic projects of
the 19th century.[xxiv] The British and the French
in Egypt, India, and other countries of the East had undertaken imperial
photographic collections. Like the Turkestanskii Al’bom, the British colonial
series People of India, which was published in eight volumes between
1868 and 1875, is focused on a purported anthropological point of view.[xxv] The intent of these
institutional collections was to provide the new rulers with an encyclopedic
catalog of the regional architecture, industry, and customs of the local
population. The cataloging of a previously undocumented (and almost never
photographed) culture on such a grand scale had never been undertaken.
When Tsar Alexander II declared the establishment of the
Governor-Generalship of Turkestan under Russian suzerainty in 1867, he
appointed Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufman its first governor-general. Kaufman,
a veteran of the wars in the Caucasus and an effective administrator as well as
military commander, believed that the proper governance of a conquered region
required a thorough understanding of the habits and customs of the native
population. Kaufman had tremendous dedication, resourcefulness, and a strong
commitment to ethnological scholarship. No other Russian military figure would
again attempt so far-reaching a project, and in fact, a later military governor
sabotaged and even tried to eradicate documentary and educational programs that
began under Kaufman’s tenure.[xxvi] Kaufman commissioned a
group of scientific experts to accompany him on the military expeditions that
captured Central Asia, including visual artists and photographers. The names of
photographers commissioned for his campaigns have not been recorded, although
it is known that he brought the artist Vasily Vereshchagin to Turkestan in
order to make a series of paintings commemorating the campaign and documenting
the native peoples and culture. Vereshchagin, a former military cadet, had been
given ensign rank and was sent off to paint both “types” and countryside.
The Governor General immediately began construction of a new and
impressive Russian town in an undeveloped section of Tashkent. He constructed
streets, parks, homes, and churches, and founded the Turkestan Public Library
to house all materials written about the region. Kaufman built a museum,
astronomical observatory, and a meteorological station, and encouraged the
establishment of a Russian and a native newspaper.[xxvii]
Kaufman strongly encouraged the display of colonial materials in public
exhibitions such as the Russian Ethnographic Exposition, which featured a
photographic collection entitled Russkaya Fotografiya, Russian
photography. According to Heather Sonntag, Kaufman adopted the exposition’s
motto as his own for the administration of Turkestan, “The study of our native
land [is] a necessity for every native Russian.”[xxviii] Kaufman and his ‘scientist’
corps contributed enormously to the Central Asian materials shown in the Moscow All-Russian Polytechnical Exhibition
of 1872. The Turkestan section of the exhibition included several
thousand displays with detailed catalog entries describing flora, fauna,
metallurgical resources, medicines, crafts of all kinds. It even contained
model shops and house interiors peopled by costumed mannequins.[xxix]
Almost as soon as he had secured Tashkent and the surrounding region,
Kaufman commissioned the Orientalist and scholar Alexander Kuhn to compile a
collection of photographs covering virtually every aspect of life in the
Khanates. [Fig. 4-7] Kaufman was remarkably successful in achieving his goal of
documenting Central Asian culture in photographs. The Turkestanskii Al’bom was
made up of six folio-size albums, 45 x 60 cm. each. Two are entitled
Archaeology and hold detailed photographs, watercolors, and plans of
architecture and ancient monuments. Two volumes cover Ethnology and include
photographs of ethnographic types, costumes, and ceremonies, entertainments and
music of all kinds. One volume covers Industry, primarily craft production and
commerce and the last, entitled History covers the establishment of the Russian
military community within Central Asia. The Al’bom was made just prior to the
introduction of dry-plate photography; the wet-plate collodion process needed
substantial preparation and exposure time, so there are no photographs of the
actual campaign, only of its aftermath, with the construction of military
barracks, encampments, portraits of officers and decorated enlisted men, and
monuments commemorating Russian victories. Depictions of Russian military failure of any kind are never seen in
extant photographs. Such materials would not have been considered for inclusion
in any project that was commissioned by the Turkestan administration.[xxx]
Little is known about the process of completing the Turkestanskii
Al’bom. The Oriental scholar Alexander Kuhn (1840-1888) was the primary
organizer. Kuhn was widely knowledgeable about Central Asian history and
culture; he was also engaged as a collector of a variety of Central Asian
materials for institutions in Tashkent, St. Petersburg, and Moscow.[xxxi] Three other compilers are
listed in the identical introductory pages of each of the Al’bom’s four
sections: M. T. Brodovsky, N. V. Bogaevsky, and General M. A. Terentyev.[xxxii] Kun is credited with
selection of the photographs and Bogaevsky is identified as the photographer of
most of the images in the archaeological volumes, but otherwise, individual
photographers are not credited. M. T. Brodovsky was one of the contributors to
the text of the catalog of the craft section of the 1872 Moscow Polytechnic
Exhibition, a finely detailed and uniquely descriptive text for the period. It
is extremely likely that photographers accompanying Kaufman as staff made the
majority of the photographs specifically for the project.[xxxiii] Photographs included in the
album occasionally are found in the form of single prints in other formats, so
it is possible that the collators collected negatives from photographers in
Turkestan to fill gaps in the collection.
The parts of Turkestan best covered by the photographs are the
Zerafshan region, including the city of Samarkand, and the Syr Darya region,
especially in the vicinity of the city of Kokand. Both Zerafshan and the Syr
Darya region had only recently come under Kaufman’s control and had undergone
fewer changes from the pre-colonial period than the new city of Tashkent.
Samarkand was a veritable living museum, with active crafts and trade, a
diverse population of both Persian and Uzbek speaking people and Central Asian
Jews. The population included long settled peoples and relatively recent
immigrants from the steppe, resident foreigners such as Indians, Afghans, and
Armenians, as well as ‘Irani’ slaves and their descendants. Kaufman’s
photographers made portraits of individuals from all of these groups. The organization of this section of the album
carries enormous ideological authority. The arrangement of portraits into
ethnic types with typical headdresses, costume etc, imply a “scientific”
attitude with a physical approach to categorization, but almost every portrait
in the Turkestanskii Al’bom includes the person’s name, along with their ethnic
identifying type. (This is a remarkably more humanistic approach than the
later, Soviet period anthropological photography in Central Asia in which mug
shots display phrenological characteristics, and subjects, including women,
were sometimes required to strip completely naked.)
Although a few ethnic groups, notably the Turkoman, are seriously
underrepresented,[xxxiv] the Al’bom is by far the
most complete single visual record of Central Asian culture ever made, even up
to the present day. It includes serial photographs of circumcision rites,
betrothal ceremonies, weddings, and funerals. An extraordinary series of
photographs records every event that forms part of the Central Asian Jew’s
wedding ritual. These rituals were never subsequently photographed, and images
from the Turkestanskii Al’bom formed a unique resource for researches
undertaken even in the 1930s.[xxxv] Musicians and their
instruments as well as other sorts of entertainments are photographed and
identified. Every conceivable craft activity was photographed and detailed
descriptions were collected as well, since these are provided in the 1872
Moscow Polytechnic Institute exhibition catalog.[xxxvi]
The organization of the Turkestanskii Al'bom
was based strictly upon Kaufman’s documentary, ethnological approach. The study
of ‘folk life’ in Russia really began in the 1870s and 1880s, when photography
made its mass market debut.[xxxvii]
Information on Russian national traditions in music, folk tales, and costume
was collected and transcribed. Kaufman
was certainly among the group of officials who endorsed and encouraged this
study.
The elaborate framing of each picture within
a sociological context severely limited the ways in which it could be viewed.
The Turkestanskii Al’bom was Realist in the sense that the photographers went
out into untouched neighborhoods, rural regions and the steppe for data.
However coercively the photographs were achieved (and it should be said that
most subjects appear quite relaxed) the challenges and results are both
stupendous. Merely establishing contact with many of the peoples pictured would
have been difficult. Obtaining permission to photograph intimate family and
religious ceremonies must have required substantial negotiation. The difficulty
of the project becomes clear when one looks in vain for photographs of similar
scenes made at a later date, and finds not a single one. In these ways the
project has immense documentary value.
In other ways, the project was one sided and imposed
upon its subjects. It was completely closed to their input; the only lens was
that of the photographer and the project planners. Yet it was honest in that it
showed nothing that was not there. Objects and background may have been moved
in order to obtain the lighting necessary for the photograph, but nothing was
added or invented. The rigid, flat quality of the photos prevent us from
injecting too much of our own emotion into the scenes. Compare this to paintings
such as Vereshchagin’s, in which Central Asian realities became completely
subordinated to a political and social message. [Fig. 20-23] In Vereshchagin’s
paintings, Central Asians are mere props in an argument that expresses support
for Slavic society’s prejudices against Muslims, and which however critical of
militarism never step beyond the political aims of empire.
Sequential scenes of social events also
display a moral message. There are interesting questions regarding another
motivation for the building of a photographic record – whether conscious or
unconscious, official or unofficial. “Ethnographic’ and “documentary”
photographs emphasize the difference between cultures, but they also establish
points of similarity within that difference and demonstrate many social
parallels between imperialist Russians and their colonial subjects. This is
especially true of photographs detailing the small matters of daily life, from
commercial exchanges in the bazaars to scenes of the family gathered around the
yurt or engaged with domestic tasks, caring for children, and so on. The shared
Russian and Central Asian experiences of living in a rigorous social hierarchy
is manifested often in photographs of Central Asians displaying the insignia of
office and in formal group and individual portraits of officials and their
staff.
At most, only seven copies of the Turkestanskii Al’bom were made.[xxxviii] The photographs are
gold-toned albumen prints mounted in the pages; the captions and designs
surrounding them were lithographed by the Military Topographic Section in
Tashkent.[xxxix] The sets were distributed
among the royal family and Imperial museums and libraries; one was held for the
Tashkent Public Library that Kaufman had founded.[xl]
Kaufman did not fully embrace the possibility
of wide distribution implicit in photography’s ease of reproduction. The
album’s four volumes of two thousand photographs were of a size to effectively
preclude the making of multiple, complete copies. Smaller, less exhaustive
photographic surveys still held immense educational, scholarly, and political
value, but research into the more limited versions of the Turkestanskii Al’bom
has yet to be published.[xli]
However, in printing only seven copies of the complete, four volume albums as a
State enterprise and presenting them only to members of the royal family, von
Kaufman severely limited their utility and reinforced the most conservative
Russian viewpoint in which the Tsar was in absolute control of his empire and
knowledge of public affairs was limited by policy to a select few. The
Turkestanskii Al’bom was made for an elite composed of scientists, scholars,
and the supra-worldly, absolute rulers of all the Russias.
The
Romantic Era - Commercial and Artistic Photography 1873-1900
The early period of colonial rule, when Turkestan was still largely
unknown, was a tremendous period for travel and “adventure” photography. New
processes made photography easier to undertake and more accessible. The
security offered by the Russian conquest permitted travelers to visit Central
Asia in relative safety for the first time. The rapid increase in a settled
Russian population in Central Asia did not bring about an integration of
Russian and Central Asian society, but at least among Russians, some
long-settled inhabitants adopted a sort of Central Asian-Russian identity. Soon
after conquest, an enormous administrative bureaucracy grew up - along with all
of its support staff and provisioners. Immigrants from all over Russia came
seeking advancement, economic opportunity, or simply political anonymity.
Between 1870 and 1914, the European inhabitants grew from 1.3% to 31% of the
urban population.[xlii]
As Tashkent grew rapidly into a regional capital, the amenities of any
provincial metropolis could be found in the broad, tree-lined streets of its
New City. The first commercial
photographic studio in Central Asia was opened in 1873 by Stanislav Fedorovich
Nikolai on St. Petersburg Street in the new Russian-built city of Tashkent.
Others soon followed: the studios of I. K. Lozinsky, Sh. A. Nemtsevich, E. E.
Korkin and B. Kh. Kapustiansky. By 1910 there were twenty photographic studios
in Tashkent city.[xliii]
These photographers did not limit themselves to studio portraits of fellow
Russians, but ventured into the Old City, into Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva,
Urgench, and Kokand to record a more traditional Central Asian urban life.
Instead of working directly for the government or the military, they
photographers worked for themselves, with firm commercial and artistic
interests in mind. Rather than focusing on the collection of ethnographic and
archaeological data, photographs were made for pleasure, for artistic
satisfaction, and for sale - as entertainment in series for the masses.
The subjects of photography of the later nineteenth century are not
very different from those of the Turkestanskii Al’bom. In fact, the same
photographic tropes are present until the 1917 Revolution. There is still a
focus on the craftsmen and colorful types of the bazaar, on architectural
monuments, tombs, and ruins. [Fig 13-14] As the life of Central Asia’s rulers
became more public, a sort of Central Asian “celebrity” photography developed
that included not only portraits but also photographs of palace interiors,
carriages, royal parks, and royal collections of knick-knacks. (In the days of
early tourism, an audience with the Emir became a regular part of Central Asian
grand tour.) Despite the difference in locale, there are many thematic ties
between Central Asian and Near Eastern or Southeast Asian photography of the
same period.
There are certain notable differences between
Central Asian and other colonial photographic paradigms during the Romantic
period. In their portrayal of native peoples around the world, many early
photographers employed clichéd Orientalist formulae, representing native
peoples as uncivilized, naïve, given over to sensate pleasure or liable to
violence. In Central Asian photography, such exploitative images are less
extreme in character than those found in other colonial empires. Important
elements of the Orientalist tropes are not found. Both Russian and Central
Asian societies were conservative, and while Central Asian exoticism was a
popular subject, it did not include the nudity or overt sexual pandering of
British and French colonial photography. Many nineteenth century photographers
of Central Asian women undoubtedly used women from the ‘houses of pleasure’
near the bazaar as models, but the women are almost always shown working or
engaged in ordinary female pastimes rather than taking languid poses. [Fig
24-29] It appears as though the intent of the photographers was to portray
ordinary household life and pleasures, and the women pictured were simply the
only models available. There no obvious difference between the character of these
urban entertainers and that of urban women in family portraits or of nomadic
women who normally lived unveiled. There is also far less use of props and
manipulated environments in Central
Asian photography than in that of Egypt or North Africa. The ordinary Central Asian environment seems to have been strange and
exotic enough not to require it. (The prop-filled photographs of Russians
dressed as Central Asians are the only exception to this.) Less obvious
conventions of other colonial photography are also absent; the Russian
photographers of Central Asia often used people to provide scale in
architectural photographs, but Russians are used as well as native Central Asians. The lives of Russians and natives are not
visually segregated: even in the Turkestanskii Al’bom there are photographs in
which natives and European Russians are shown in the markets together. Later
photographs of the cities often include varied ethnic populations, and
portraits of officials very often include mixed groups – some even Russians in
Central Asian dress.
Because of the political history shared by Russians
and Central Asians, the life of their Muslim neighbors was not as bizarre and
different to Russians as that of Fiji Islanders was to the British, for
example. Photographers often did attempt to instill a sense of drama into their
photographic endeavors, and sometimes presented themselves as taking great
risks to ‘capture’ an image. This element of taking on the unknown appealed to
the public’s romantic interest, and enabled the viewers to vicariously share
the experience of the photographer from the comfort and safety of their own
homes.
The style and characteristic view of each individual artist becomes
more distinct during the Romantic period. As photography became physically
easier through the use of dry plate exposures and photographic technology
permitted more range of movement, the artist’s “eye” became a more important
element in each photograph. Many fine photographers of Russian and other
nationalities worked in Central Asia during the Romantic period; only the most
prolific and important can be singled out here. A more complete list is
attached as an appendix, but it should be noted that only a small proportion of
photographs are actually signed or identified by mounting cards or albums.[xliv] Most photographs are loose,
unmounted, and unsigned. In some cases, the names of working photographers are
known through text references, but their works cannot be specifically
identified.
I. Vvedensky, N. P. Petrovsky, and V. Kozlovsky were all Russian
amateur photographers who worked in portraiture, landscape, and
non-documentary and personal photography. [Fig. 11-12] Vvedensky was an
extremely fine photographer who worked primarily in Samarkand between 1894 and
1897.[xlv] Vvedensky excelled in a
graceful composition and his photographs often express an affectionate humor
and feeling of intimacy that reveals his understanding of the life of the city
of Samarkand. Kozlovsky worked in Samarkand and Kokand in the 1890s. His approach is somewhat different from other
photographers of the period, as he often took fairly wide angle, close-in
photographs even in his larger compositions, shooting from ground level looking
up. Exceptionally beautiful photographs from the same period are also signed by
N. P. Petrovsky, an engineer and amateur photographer whose works are found in
sufficient quantities to show that he, like a few others among these amateur
photographers, made arrangements for their works to be distributed for public
sale through bookstores or photographic studios in Tashkent.[xlvi]
Nikolai Veselovsky (1848-1918) was an amateur photographer and scholar
of Oriental languages who first accompanied an archaeological expedition to
Russian Turkestan in 1885. Beginning in 1895, he headed the first major
expedition to study archaeological and monumental remains in Samarkand, a
project in which fellow photographer-scholars S.M. Dudin and I. Chistiakov were
also participants.
Chistikov (1865-1935) was a former watchman of the St Petersburg office
of the Royal Archaeological Commission, where one of its Fellows taught him
photography. He was employed at the Commission as photographer throughout the
pre-Revolutionary period, when it was reorganized into the Russian
Archaeological Commission.[xlvii] Lev Semenovich Barshchevsky
(d.1910) was an army officer and amateur photographer. Barshchevsky served from
the capture of Samarkand until 1898 in Turkestan. According to Vitaly Naumkin,
Barshchevsky knew the local languages and took part in most of the scientific
expeditions round Turkestan, enjoying great popularity among the people of the
Bukhara khanate.[xlviii] He collected photographs as
well as making his own with a box camera presented to him by Paul Nadar.
The listing of Russian photographers
makes clear that a high percentage of colonial period photographers in Central
Asia were Orientalists and scholars, persons with substantial knowledge of
Central Asian rich history and culture. Whether by chance or design, their
works often illustrate historical comparisons or constructs, juxtaposing the
Central Asian peoples of their time with landscapes or monuments of a distant
era. The result is less of a “ruins aesthetic,” as described by James C. Faris,
than an historical aesthetic that places people in a context surrounded by past
glories.[xlix] In photography from Egypt
or India, native peoples are often passive and depersonalized in such
photographs; they appear to be standing in as convenient measuring devices to
establish the proportions of monuments for the viewer. In Central Asian
photography, however, natives are more often shown in activities related to the
monuments. They pray in the crumbling mosques or sell foodstuffs in the shadow
of medresses, and when they are photographed, they generally look back at the
camera with interest. Central Asia’s
past is not given greater weight than its present, nor does it appear
richer, more precious, or more value laden.
Scholarly, amateur, and state-employed photographers are often not well
known simply because their photographs were not commercially available. The
disruptions of Revolution and the hostility toward historical study of the
Imperial period by the Soviet state prevented work in Central Asian archives
until quite recently. The frequent transfer of collections from one institution
to another has left many museum and institutions collections with large gaps in
provenance.
Commercial photographic series, in
comparison, were far better distributed and well known, but their creators
sometimes lack an official history. The series were numbered, captioned, and
dated, sometimes in the negative, at other times on the printed cards in which
they were mounted. The series photographs attempt a different sort of
all-inclusiveness than is found in the Kaufman albums, which were an
anthropologically-based. The series photographs presented the standard tropes
of travel photographs everywhere: famous sites, curious customs, interior and
exterior decorative programs, crafts manufactures, and costumes. They answered
all the most obvious questions about Central Asia that a casual visitor would
be likely to ask. They were commercially produced, marketed in all towns with a
substantial European population or visited by tourists, and were purchased as
souvenirs by travelers and Russian occupiers alike.
F. Hordet was the first photographer of an extensive commercial series.
[Fig. 30-35] Hordet was French – his prints are also captioned by writing
directly on the negative and sometimes additionally on the print itself in both
French and Russian, but his name is signed using Cyrillic print. Almost nothing
is known of Hordet except that he traveled in Central Asia between 1885 and
1892.[l] Hordet produced an
extraordinary series of photographs covering many aspects of life in Samarkand
and Bukhara, from the commercial enterprises of the bazaar to scenes of the
Emir’s palace and portraits of men, women, and children. His photographs often
focus on the details of a scene - elements of dress, interior decoration,
individual items in a shop or display. Though often faded, his photographs
contain a wealth of information about the material culture of the Central Asian
khanates, and his portraits have greater individuality and character than those
of many other photographers. Hordet’s sepia-toned albumen prints were in the
general range of 16 x 22 cm size and mounted on board. His negative-numbering
system gives some clue to his prolific nature. Known prints span at least
between numbers 1504 and 1602, a few are numbered in the 1800s or 2000s, and
many more appear between 2745 and 2791.
G. A. Pankratiev, a Russian army captain and amateur photographer,
produced an important series of photographs of architectural monuments and
images of the city of Samarkand between 1894 and 1904, in part funded by Count
Rostovtsev. [Fig. 36-38] Bookstores in Samarkand and Tashkent sold sets of
twenty, fifty, and eighty albumen print photographs mounted on card, [li] each of 11.5 cm x 17 cm
dimension, and generally accompanied by a printed, glued-on caption identifying
subject and locale.
Traveling Europeans brought another dimension to Central Asian
photography. Many superb French, Swiss, German, and Austrian photographers
photographed extensively in Central Asia, occasionally publishing works –
primarily as illustrations to travelogues but more often donating their
photographic collections to archives and museums in their home country. The
work of several French and Swiss photographers is particularly refined. The
exoticism of the subject or landscape is less important than the beauty of an
elegant, formal composition.
The son of a Swiss merchant active in Russian trade, Henri Moser
(1894-1923) was in many ways typical of the European adventurer of the late 19th
century - the type one finds photographed dressed in native costume in the
frontispiece of an inevitable book of travels. Moser had a far greater
commitment to the region than many of his fellow travelers. He made four
arduous journeys into Central Asia; in 1868-1869, 1870, 1883-1884 and
1889-1890, but never fulfilled his hopes of making his way by land to India.
Moser was a talented writer and a close observer of artistic detail. His A
Travers l’Asie Centrale,[lii] a description of his
journey in the suite of the Prince of Wittgenstein through the steppe to
Bukhara, provides valuable details of the costume and habits of the native
Central Asians. [Fig. 8-10]
Moser’s economic ventures in Central Asia were less than successful; he
served as a soldier in the Tashkent Russian garrison, as manager of a Turkish
bath, as a silk dealer and an agricultural specialist, also publishing a more
prosaic work on irrigation in Central Asia. He eventually abandoned hope of
finding wealth in Central Asia and returned to Switzerland, where after more
difficult years he finally became a prosperous businessman. Moser was a great
admirer and passionate collector of exotic crafts, a man who reveled in the
romance of the East. He collected over 4000 objects on his travels and from
dealers in subsequent years: metalwork, jewelry, fabric, costume, manuscripts,
and hundreds of knives and other arms. On his death, his enormous collection of
Central Asian materials and photographs was donated to the Berne Historical
Museum.
French photographers of note include Leon Blot, a furrier who traveled
frequently to Russia on business and journeyed into Central Asia in 1905.[liii] Henri de Bouillane de
Lacoste, an officer and diplomat, traveled through Persia and the oasis town of
Central Asia and into Kashmir through the Pamir and Karakorum.[liv] The Dutch-German Hughes
Krafft, came to Central Asia only after extensive travels around the world. In
1898 he set off for a long desired journey to Turkestan where he made an
enormous number of photographs, some 200 of which he published,[lv] and subsequently formed
part of an exhibition with his antiquities and works of art gathered during his
trip.[lvi] The collection of
photographs of Louis Marin, some of which were purchased from various sources
enroute on various travels through Central Asia in 1899, and China and Siberia
a few years later – and others which were executed by himself and his
companions – demonstrate the changing range of photographic styles at the turn
of the century. The Marin collection ranges from clichéd studio portraits of
richly costumed native “types” to moving, highly individual portraits of native
peoples, caught at the instant as he and his companions passed them by.[lvii]
The most sophisticated and skilled of the traveling photographers was
undoubtedly the Frenchman Paul Nadar (1856-1939), son of the celebrated
photographer Felix Tournachon (Nadar). {Fig. 39-41] Paul Nadar was the
representative of the Eastman photograph company in Paris. In 1890, he traveled
across Europe and the Mediterranean to Central Asia with his friend Edouard
Blanc, a naturalist, geographer, and railway construction specialist. Nadar
made over twelve hundred photographs on Eastman’s new flexible nitrocellulose
film with a box camera. His photographs are unabashedly nostalgic and
hauntingly beautiful, and have what are probably the most elegant compositions
and strength of form of all the photographs made in nineteenth century Central
Asia.
The works of the photographers listed above demonstrate clearly the
evolutionary steps within Central Asian photography. Photography moves from nearly
anonymous, colonial period documentary into both “amateur” and commercially
promoted works that offer a compendium of virtual Central Asian experiences and
reach an aesthetic level in which the subject matter – whether native life or
native architecture – becomes less important than the artistry of the
photographer. Each of the photographers above was a professional, technically
skilled photographic artist. Each developed an individual style, with
characteristic, often distinctive choice of subject and composition. The
quality of their prints is strikingly even and consistent.
By the mid 1890s however, after the introduction of the Kodak camera,
another type of Central Asian photograph comes to dominate the oeuvre, if it
can be called that, but only by its numbers. The most common Central Asian
image dating from about 1890 until the 1917 revolution is a street shot. The
majority of such photographs are hazy, poorly lit, and flat. They often lack
information or visual interest because they are taken from too far away for the
subjects to be clear. In all probability, this is because the photographer is
an amateur who, struck by the color or exoticism of the street scene before
him, raised his camera and shot without thinking anything but, “I’ve got to have
this!” It is to the credit of the many Russian families who painstakingly
organized family albums that these indistinct and disappointing home-generated
snapshots are invariably supplemented by professional photographs and postcards
purchased to improve the album’s overall quality and impact.
The last decades of the nineteenth century were a Golden Age of
artistic photography in Central Asia. Looking back upon these photographs from
the present, the photographs seem imbued with a feeling of nostalgia, of hearkening
back rather than looking forward. Perhaps it is only with the clarity of
hindsight that the end of the century seems also be an end to the Romantic
period in Central Asian photography.
Some photographers of the twentieth century attempt to recapture this
sense of romance and exoticism, but their work is inevitably tinged somehow
with the modern age – it is too casual, too fast moving, or in the case of the
finest work, the focus has shifted slightly to give more weight to the
interests and agenda of the artist – the scene is Orientalist, but the
treatment is subtly Modern.
With the close of the century, there was a very public culmination and
summation of the work of past decades in a monumental exhibition. The First
Turkestanian Photographic Exhibition was held in Tashkent from the 19th-26th of
September, 1899 and included works by all of the most important artistic
photographers working in Central Asia. K. Timaev headed the exhibition
commission, which presented more than 2500 prints in twelve different sections
or divisions. The exhibition included, among that of other artists, works by L.
S. Barshchevski, Bykovsky, B. N. Kastalsky, N. N. Nehoroshev, S. F. Nikolai, G.
A. Pankratiev, and A. A. Polovtsev. [lviii] Important collections made
by B. N. Kastalsky, N. N. Pantusovy, A. A. Polovtsev, and the Grand Duke
Nikolai Konstantinovich were shown. No other exhibitions held in Central Asia
with a focus on photography have been identified until the First Turkestan
Exhibition of Paintings held in Tashkent in 1911, and none has ever again taken
place on so grand a scale.[lix]
Postcards
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, postcards became
enormously popular both for carrying messages and as collectors items and
souvenirs. Literally tens of millions of postcards were produced in a single
year, and the business was highly competitive. Postcards were made to order for
clients in small and large cities on every continent. Postcards soon became one
of the most important ways that images of foreign locales and people were
transmitted and understood around the entire world.
Postal cards without ornamentation became available for government use
in Russia in late 1894. Soon, “otkrit” or “open” letters were available for
sale as printed cards with illustrations and a small space for writing on one
side (only the address was allowed on the back) in Moscow, Kiev, and Riga.[lx] The first postcards with
Central Asian images date to just before the turn of the century. [fig. 39-41]
The “otkrit” were quickly adopted both for local use and for sale to the
tourists that first arrived in substantial numbers around the same time. Firms
located outside of Central Asia printed many of the postcards. Before the 1917
Revolution, Kunstanstalt Friedewald und Frick in Berlin, Sherer, Nabholz and
Co. in Moscow, and Granbergs Brekfort in Stockholm appear to have been the
largest outside firms. Central Asian firms located in Andijan, Ashkabad, and
Kokand are also credited on early postcards.[lxi]
Traveling salesmen from large postcard companies solicited orders in
distant locations, at the same time collecting and even taking photographs to
enhance their available stock. Photographs with Central Asian images were also
produced for the great international fairs of the period, where they were sold
in vast quantities. (It is interesting to note that the Bukharan Emir Abdulahad
Khan had tremendous enthusiasm for fairs and expositions, and sent items for
display from his personal collection to at least twelve international
exhibitions.
In Central Asia, the use of postcards as both document and personal
remembrance represented a natural extension of the series photographs by
artists such as Hordet and Pankratiev. In previous years, series photographs
such as cabinet cards of the “sights” of Central Asia, were purchased as
souvenirs of journeys or longer stays in Central Asia. The tropes of the series
postcards that followed were virtually identical to the series photographs:
bazaars, native wares, eating houses, spectacles, fairs and entertainers, and
compositions including anonymous but colorfully dressed natives before a
monumental building or a shrine.
Many essentially documentary photographs made by an earlier generation
of photographers were reproduced as postcards with the generalized titles
characteristic of the genre. The earlier photographs were not only a ready source
of pre-existing, and therefore inexpensive postcard “stock” photographs, they
also showed a more traditional and exotic way of life. Sometimes these reused
images bear incongruous or implausible messages – there are printed greetings
in colloquial Russian from steppe nomads and less than friendly native girls.
With the exception of portraits of native rulers, postcards do not identify
human subjects by name, at most they identify them by occupation or as ethnic
“types.”
The earliest images found on Central Asian postcards, dating to
1897-1898, are often lithographed drawings drawn from photographs.[lxii] Photographs made
specifically for postcard production range from relatively uninspiring views of
government buildings and shop fronts (a means of advertising commonly employed
in Europe and the U.S. as well) to the more dramatic "native" themes.
A photographic image could carry multiple meanings, but the message of the
postcard was purposeful and unambiguous. The Central Asian postcard provided a
pre-defined, encapsulated vision of an exotic culture or else it celebrated
monuments of empire. If there was any possibility of misunderstanding the
visual content of the image, the caption clarified it. Many images on postcards
are titillating or deliberately exotic; crippled beggars, lepers and dervishes,
faked executions and contrived harem scenes. Until the Soviet period, postcards
rarely departed from the familiar, colonial themes of native types, landmarks,
local handicraft production, markets, and public entertainments.
The rapid spread of photography and the development of new printing
techniques such as the invention of halftone screens in 1888 and rotary presses
in 1900 permitted an infinite choice of subject, treatment, and quality of
production, from simple line drawings to good quality photo-prints.[lxiii] More romantic subjects like
luxuriously clothed Central Asian men and women lent themselves easily to the
addition of very dramatic colors. Colored postcards are far less common than
simple black and white printed ones, but it seems likely that these colored
postcards were more treasured and likely to be preserved, and that they
originally formed an even smaller proportion of the total postcard production.
Postcards were sold in several shops in Tashkent and Samarkand, and
carried by at least one store in Margelan, Kokand, Andijan, and Namangan. It is
likely that no less than three thousand different Central Asian postcards were
made before the Revolution.[lxiv]
Social
change and the arrival of Modernism, 1900-1917
The turn of the century brought not only changes in artistic styles in
photography but also alterations in the social map of Central Asia that for the
first time, welcomed native residents into the professional and technologically
oriented stratum of society.
Boris Golender identifies the first native Uzbek photographic
establishment as that of Ilkhom Khan, a photographic atelier that opened in the
Old City of Tashkent in 1902, and which was very popular in the
pre-revolutionary period.[lxv]
Hudaibergen Divanov (1878-1938), the first well-known Uzbek
photographer, was an example of this type of new, modernist thinker.[lxvi] Divanov was born in the
Khorezm region, where his father was secretary to the Khivan Khan. The young
Divanov was given a camera by a German craftsman, Penner, who had been moved
from the Volga region into the town of Aq Meschit. Divanov began taking
landscape photographs and portraits of his family in 1903, but soon came into
conflict with the religious authorities of the town. They complained to
Muhammad Rahim II, Khan of Khiva, that Divanov’s photography was incompatible
with Muslim teachings. Divanov’s father defended him and encouraged his work.
In response, the Khan asked Divanov to take his portrait. (Muhammad Rahim was a
literate, well-educated, and exceptionally open-minded ruler. A poet, he had
established the first mechanical printing of Uzbek literature in Turkestan in
1875.)[lxvii] The Khan was satisfied with
the resulting portrait. The ruler quieted the clergy, and gave Divanov a job at
the Khivan mint. Divanov also acted as official photographer to the court. When
the Khan sent a mission led by his Vizier to St. Petersburg in 1907, Divanov
accompanied it and was allowed to study photography there for two months. He
returned to Khiva with a Pathé film camera, a gramophone, and new camera
apparatus.[lxviii]
Divanov also supplied materials to commercial photo studios. For the
most part, his work has a quiet, unobtrusive character – the viewer feels that
he is an unnoticed participant in the scenes of agriculture, canal building,
and village meetings. [fig. 51-53] (There are a few known exceptions, in
particular one extraordinary photograph of a very busy bazaar scene in which
everyone is looking directly at the photographer, as if he had called out,
“Hey, look at the camera!”) [fig. 54] There is also a very traditional,
undisturbed feel to the environment in which the photographs were made;
Divanov’s photographs of the teens and twenties could have been taken in the
late nineteenth century – except for the paper and the written date. In part
this is because his subjects were the people and events of a small provincial
capital. Khiva and its environs had a population of only 30,000 in 1900.[lxix] Life in the town had
changed little in comparison to the larger cities of Turkestan. Divanov’s
prints are generally small in size. Often a date and description of the
activities depicted is written in Persian or Turki directly onto the negative.
Divanov held a variety of posts; he served as Minister of Finance of
the Khorezm Republic; in 1910 he was the first cameraman at the first Uzbek
film studio,[lxx] and later taught at the
Pedagogical Technical College. He became suspect during the years of Stalin’s
terror, and was shot in 1938, but was posthumously “rehabilitated” in 1958 on
Stalin’s death.
In the turbulent years just before the revolution, Russian scientists
and explorers made by far the most serious examination of Central and East
Asian cultures to date. Despite sporadic uprisings among the native population,
well-entrenched colonial administrative centers could provide secure home bases
for archeological and ethnographic expeditions to Central Asia. For the most
daring explorers, it was even possible to travel through the lands of the
Turkoman, desert horsemen who a few years before had lived by plundering
caravans and capturing unwary travelers for slaves. International scholars,
most of them Russian, collected and translated manuscripts and inscriptions
dating from the Achaemenid through the Timurid periods. Historians,
archaeologists, and ethnographers delved into archives and treasuries,
excavated sites, and collected data from informants. V. V. Radlov, V. V.
Bartold, Albert Von Le Coq, and the British Aurel Stein are among the most
remarkable Central Asian scholars of this time. Their work enabled a far more
accurate and detailed understanding of Central Asia’s history and culture than
have hitherto been achieved. It is
unusual to find a photographer among the ranks of great scholars, but in this
time and place, such is indeed the case.
Samuel Martinovich Dudin (1863-1929) was an anomaly even among
explorer-academics. Though greatly respected in scientific circles, he was an
autodidact, a self-taught photographer, archeologist, ethnographer, and
collector of artifacts who had learned through fieldwork rather than university
studies. Trained as a painter under the artist Ilya Repin, Dudin had an
extraordinary eye and a passion for the art of many periods and cultures.
Unlike many of his academic colleagues, Dudin moved easily in a strange and
utterly foreign world. He devised new methods of research, following potters
and metal smiths through each step of their work in order to understand the
techniques of medieval craftsmen. He studied local languages, especially the
terminology of the makers of handicrafts.
Dudin made many important acquisitions for Russian museums, among them,
one of the finest collections of tribal carpets in the world. Never content to
rely on information gathered secondhand, Dudin traveled to nomad encampments on
the steppe to learn directly from weavers. The results of his extensive
journeys in Central Asia between 1893 and 1915 are preserved in his numerous
published works, his paintings and drawings, and in many hundreds of glass negatives
in Russian, German, and Central Asian archives. [fig. 55-61]
Dudin worked within the confines of scientific expeditions for Russian
institutions. These official commissions allowed Dudin greater freedom of
movement and choice of subject than would otherwise have been possible. The
work of 19th and early 20th century amateur and studio
photographers in the colonial centers is often artistically accomplished and of
substantive documentary interest, but only Dudin was able to spend months, even
years, taking photographs in the most inaccessible regions of Central Asia.
Dudin’s life was a difficult one, in which good fortune and opportunity
were interlaced with catastrophic events. He was born in 1863 in Rovnoye in the
Ukraine. Like many idealistic students of the period, he joined a
political-cultural movement engaged in educating local peasants. Dudin became
the group’s artist-propagandist, translating revolutionary works into
Ukrainian, making posters and printing leaflets. In 1882 his school-based group
joined the radical Kharkov “People’s Will” group, and began making explosives.
A government agent infiltrated their circle and Dudin was arrested in the
summer of 1884. He was eventually transported to a central prison in Moscow,
and three years later, at the age of twenty-four, he was exiled to Siberia.
There, Dudin was assigned to care for the Selenginsk meteorological station,
and began collecting geological and folkloric material. He met the famous
Russian explorer G. M. Potanin, who asked Dudin to make ethnographic sketches
of Buriat life.
The authorities arbitrarily determined places of exile, and Dudin was
moved to Troitskosavsk, Siberia, where he found employment with the local
photographer. In 1891, Dudin met the great Russian scholar V.V. Radlov, leader
of the Orkhon expedition, who was so impressed with the young artist that he
asked him to join his archeological expedition as painter and photographer.
When the expedition ended, Radlov brought Dudin back to the capital, and with
Potanin’s help, successfully petitioned for his release from exile. Dudin
joined the St. Petersburg Academy of Art and was given a scholarship to study
in Vienna and Paris. When he returned to St. Petersburg, he joined the
“Peredvizhniki” or Itinerants group of Russian painters.
In 1893, Radlov announced to Dudin that he and another young scientist,
V. V. Bartold, were to set out to study the ancient monuments in the regions of
the rivers Chu and Ili[lxxi]. Dudin could not have had a
better teacher as his companion; Bartold was already a distinguished academic
and would become the greatest scholar of medieval Central Asia. The two
traveled by freighter, railroad, carriage and finally on horseback through the
steppe. Neither had been trained to undertake such an expedition. Many years
later, in his eulogy for Dudin, Bartold wrote, “I have not yet spoken about the
steppe wells with half-salt water or about those days when having reached the
end of his cigarettes, Samuel Martinovich arrived at the furthest bounds of
irritation - particularly at night time…in an overcrowded third class wagon,
and this state not only affected his fellow traveler but also the surrounding
public. Sometimes several days went past, before he was himself again. It was
understood by us that any trifling irritability disappeared at once, if only he
succeeded in producing some kind of archeological find…”[lxxii]
In 1898 Dudin returned to Central Asia to study the 14th and
15th century monuments of Samarkand, which would be the subject of
an early monograph.[lxxiii] He made over 200 large
plate (24 x 30 cm) negatives of the tile-worked buildings – which are still
used today as a basis for restoration work. [lxxiv]
Dudin’s most important contribution to Central Asian studies came about
as a result of a decision by the Russian imperial family to expand the
ethnographic department at the Russian Museum.[lxxv] This 1900 expedition to
collect materials for the new department was well organized and equipped. Dudin
was able to order the latest German cameras and lenses and special crates were
built for a portable photo laboratory, so he could be sure that his photographs
had been successful at each point on his journeys. This expedition resulted in
a collection of over 2000 glass negatives. These images have incalculable
scientific value, especially in the documentation of crafts processes[lxxvi] and of textiles and
costumes of the period. But the photographs are also the work of an artist.
They are composed but never contrived. They have a modern energy and impact.
Dudin made stark and dramatic landscape photographs of Central Asia’s
silt-laden rivers and bare hills as well as shadowed studies of tree-lined
villages, and the rough-cut meander of irrigation canals. Formal composition is
more important than the activities of a small bazaar in a photograph of a
street scene, where the cylinder of an ancient, tiled tower thrusts out and
above the shanty-like stalls. Despite the inherent exoticism of his subjects,
Dudin’s photographs have an intimacy unusual in photography of the colonial
period
Dudin manages to avoid sentimentality – and the Orientalist vision -
even in portraits of women. The women in his photographs are working girls:
weavers, musicians, and nomads on the move, not languid odalisques. Dudin’s
commission to photograph native costume was difficult to achieve in the cities,
where women were secluded. He is said to have found his female models in the
‘houses of entertainment’ near the bazaar. His portraits of men are direct and
detailed. Their position in society is clear from their attitudes and from
their costumes, whether they wear a rich man’s silks or the calicos
characteristic of day-to-day urban dress.
In addition to making photographs, Dudin collected several thousand
objects during three years of almost continuous travel from 1900 to 1903,
returning to St. Petersburg for only brief periods each winter to catalog the
newly acquired materials. In 1905 Dudin returned again to Central Asia to carry
out excavations at the Shah Zindeh mausoleum complex in Samarkand.[lxxvii] At the same time, he assembled
a large collection of Central Asian ceramics for the Academy Museum and the
Russian Museum. Three years later he made another journey to Samarkand, where
he made remarkably detailed watercolor sketches and still more photographs of
its Islamic monuments.
From 1909 to 1910, and again in 1914 and 1915, Dudin took part in
expeditions in eastern Turkestan and western China, photographing and making a
detailed scientific study of the early Buddhist wall-paintings and sculpture in
the ancient cave temples of Dunhuang and documenting the oasis cultures of the
Tarim Basin.[lxxviii] The expeditions were headed
by S. F. Oldenburg, who wrote, “Very often, the enormous significance which the
photographer had on the work of the expedition is not sufficiently taken into
account, nor is the enormous difficulty and the completely special character
which the expeditionary photographer must have. S. M. always considered the
chance that it would be impossible to repeat exposures… where in the passage of
time… valuable scientific objects might disappear totally. S. M. might justly
be called a photographer-scholar…it is no exaggeration to state that in many
areas involving the material culture of Central Asia, it would be impossible to
do decisive research in our time without the materials of Samuel Martinovich.”[lxxix]
Dudin worked at several St. Petersburg museums during the war years,
serving as Director of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography at one time.
He continued to serve in an astonishing number of official positions in the
post-revolutionary period, in most of them without pay.[lxxx] In 1920-1921 the State
Expert Commission assigned him the task of stocktaking in the State Treasuries.[lxxxi] The State Hermitage, the
Russian Museum, and other institutions employed Dudin as a consultant on
ceramics and applied art. Dudin’s last post was as an instructor in photography
in the geographical section of Leningrad State University at Sablin, where he
died in on July 9th, 1929.
For the most part, Dudin’s photographs are preserved in glass negatives
(many of them signed in the negative) in the archives of the Russian museums
where he worked for so many years. Many of the 600 glass negatives made in 1899
documenting the folk art and customs of Akmolinsk and Semipalatinsk regions
were utilized in the Russian pavilions at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. These
were presented to Germany at the exhibition’s close, and only copies were
returned to Russia. [lxxxii] (Glass negatives continued
in common use well into the 1970s in parts of the Soviet Union, and negative
copies, sometimes of the third and fourth generation, also rest in Central
Asian archives.[lxxxiii]) Many of Dudin’s original
negatives were destroyed when the Museum of Ethnography received a direct hit
in aerial bombing during WWII. A limited number of vintage prints are known
outside of archives within the former Soviet Union. Most of these are
sepia-toned silver gelatin prints.
S. M. Dudin remains one of the most extraordinary figures in the
Russian colonial period. His intensity and his passion for art astonished and
sometimes bewildered his academic colleagues. His versatility as artist and
scholar, his combined scientific focus and technical skills make him difficult
to categorize. His work as ethnographer and archeologist helped to define
Central Asia’s past; his photographs establish his position as the finest of
all pre-Revolutionary Russian photographers in the region.
Pictorialism
versus Realism – S. M. Prokhudin-Gorski, technician, ‘light-painter’ and color
photographer for the Tsar
The first decades of the twentieth century saw the growth of a
photographic style called Pictorialism that relied on painterly effects akin to
those of Impressionist painters. Pictorialist photographers stressed
abstraction, suggestion, and emotion rather than clear representation. The
photographer manipulated the lens or created effects in the darkroom that gave
the photograph a soft focus or shadow, deliberately obscuring detail and
otherwise altering the image. Photographers in Central Asia doubtless experimented
with these methods, especially in the post-Revolutionary years, since
Pictorialism as a movement lasted longer in the Soviet Union than in Europe and
remained widespread until the mid 1930s. (The artist-photographer Max Penson
worked in the Pictorialist style in both the 1920s and in the 1940s.)
Well-known Pictorialist photographers such as Yuri Eremin and Vasily Ulytin
worked in the Caucasus, creating romantic, soft-focus images in that dramatic
landscape. While photographs in what may be a deliberate attempt at
Pictorialist style are occasionally found in Central Asia, no named Central
Asian photographer can be identified working in that style until after the
Russian Revolution. Perhaps this is because the Pictorialist style stood in
contradiction to the documentary interests that drove most of Central Asian
photography and it never took hold as an important style in the region.
Samuel Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was a pioneering color
photographer, staunch advocate of photographic Realism, and one of the most
noted opponents to the Pictorialist movement. Prokudin-Gorskii was deeply
committed to the advancement of modern photographic science in Russia. In 1906,
he became editor of Russia’s premier photographic journal, “Photo liubitel,”
amateur photography. Prokudin-Gorski used his editorial position to support the
general interest of photographers in Russia as well. His dedication to achieve
recognition – and copyright – for photographer’s work as art led to passage of
the first copyright law related to photography in Russia in 1911.[lxxxiv] Prokudin-Gorskii encouraged astronomical
studies and other forms of scientific photography. His greatest contribution to
Russian photo-science, however, was his development of one of the earliest
methods of producing color images. [fig. 62-67]
Prokudin-Gorskii was a member of the St. Petersburg elite, and a
graduate of the Alexander Lyceum and the Natural Sciences Faculty of the
Institute of Applied Technology. He taught chemistry at Charlottenburg in Germany,
where he met Adolph Mieth, a chemist working on panchromatic emulsions.
Prokudin-Gorski then went on to Paris, where he worked with Edme Jules Maumene,
researching color photography. On his return to Russian, Prokudin-Gorskii
established technical workshops in photography and published several books of
photographic instruction. Starting in 1904, he concentrated on designing a
photographic system using color-sensitive photographic plates that was suited
for projected images. Prokudin-Gorskii built a camera with which he exposed
three images in rapid succession through red, green, and blue filters onto a
long glass plate. When developed and projected through a similar filter system,
the superimposed images appeared in rich color. Prokudin-Gorskii’s system could
also be used to print in color,[lxxxv] but his primary interest
lay in educating the Russian people about their country, and he believed that
projected images would be most effective when used for public education.
A series of invitations to
demonstrate his color projection images led to a presentation for Tsar Nicholas
and his family, and an audience with the Emperor. There, Prokudin-Gorskii was
able to lay out his plans for an educational project for use in schools that
would utilize color images from all the Tsar’s dominions. Prokhudin-Gorskii
wished to photograph the varied peoples of the Russian empire, their customs,
homes, monuments, historic buildings, and churches.
Tsar Nicholas II granted Prokhudin-Gorskii permission to travel
throughout the Russian Empire to create a photographic record of its historical
riches and diverse cultures. Between 1909 and 1915 Prokhudin-Gorskii traveled
by specially equipped boat and train to collect images from the Far East, the
Caucasus and Central Asia as well as from the central and western regions of
the empire.[lxxxvi] In Central Asia, his photographs include
portraits of people from many of the different ethnic groups that made up the
Khanates’ population. He photographed the Emir of Bukhara, shepherds in their
fields, clerks, schoolboys, and even prisoners in the jails. Despite the physical constraints imposed by
his three-exposure system, Prokhudin-Gorskii achieved a remarkable naturalness
in many of his photographs. Notwithstanding their apparent ease, his images are
extremely self-conscious. The subjects – perhaps because they had to remain so
still for the completion of the three shots – sometimes seem to be
participating in the act of photography. The mere fact of their color may
distract the viewer from their excellence in conception and execution.
Prokhudin-Gorskii’s artistic strength is revealed in powerful compositions of
masses of color at a time when no models—except for painting— existed for such
work.
The Revolution forced Prokhudin-Gorskii out of Russia in 1918. The
Tsar’s patronage had made his researches possible; now his association with the
Imperial family endangered his life. Prokhudin-Gorskii determined to leave
Russia with his family, and applied for permission to transport his archives
out of the country. State officials refused permission for Prokudin-Gorskii to
keep images of locations of potential strategic importance (mostly related to
his work for the maritime ministry). Images of the Royal family were removed by
Prokudin-Gorskii himself, who considered them too dangerous. Prokudin-Gorskii
was eventually permitted to leave Russia with approximately two thousand glass
plate negatives. He settled in France with his wife and daughter. In 1948, the
negatives were acquired by the Library of Congress from his heirs.[lxxxvii]
The revolutionary forces that drove Prokhudin-Gorskii
abroad also curtailed the documentary work of other photographers. Ethnology
and anthropology were no longer
perceived as empirical social sciences. They existed to serve a political
function, cataloging and defining the human resources available to the State.
Soon, photography itself would become a tool of the communist movement - the
most immediate and eloquent expression
of the Marxist progressive polemic.
The color photographs of Prokudi-Gorskii serve as a formal as well as a
chronological endpoint to the photography of the colonial period in Central
Asia. Prokudin-Gorskii’s invention came about through a conjunction of
interests in public education, scientific development, and Realist art – all
forces of the Modern age. The shock of seeing a photograph from almost one
hundred years ago in true color is palpable – these photographs provoke an
entirely different reaction in the viewer than paintings and hand colored
photographs and postcards of the same period. To a degree, this reaction forces
a reassessment of how the perceived age of a photograph affects the way it is
seen. In a sense, the period itself is viewed through a black and white or
sepia internal lens, and it is difficult to accept these color images as
antique, or the people pictured in them as long dead.
The Russian revolution marked a break with all past traditions in art
and documentary. There are, however, many elements of colonial perspective that
are strongly retained and even reinforced in the art of the early Soviet and
Stalinist period. In Soviet photography, the roles of civilizer and barbarian
are given even greater definition, albeit within a “Modern” visual formula. In
Soviet photography, it is the communist Russian who is the adult and the
civilizer, and the Uzbek or Turkoman becomes the child who must learn.
The revolution also marks a point of departure between the styles of
Soviet and Western photography. Western international photographers begin to
embrace a sort of “National Geographic” style: exceptionally well composed,
well-lit, and richly beautiful photographs with a humanist and compassionate
message. In 1932, while travel was still possible in Central Asia, the Swiss
photographer Ella Maillart made outstanding photographs of this genre.[lxxxviii] On the other side of the
Soviet curtain, the photographer Max Penson created a highly influential Soviet
vision of Central Asia that set the standard for decades to come. Penson, the
photographer most closely associated with the building of a Soviet state in
Uzbekistan, utilized dramatic angles, dynamic, thrusting forms, and idealized,
heroic models. His work valorizes mechanization, homogenous social development,
and a caretaker State. Photography became more important than ever before as
the key transmitter of an unambiguous vision of a Soviet, rather than Central
Asian future. Throughout the Soviet period, photography was the medium of
choice for spreading the Bolshevik message to the Soviet Union’s multilingual
and multi-ethnic population.
Author’s Final Thoughts
Although at great human, social, and cultural cost, seventy years of
Soviet domination did succeed in transforming Central Asia. It reduced native
languages to secondary status, consolidated ethnic identities, and disrupted or
destroyed many religious, social, and family traditions. In the process, it
also removed important elements of Central Asia’s past from history books and
from people’s consciousness. Despite Central Asia’s isolation and its relative
poverty, factors that tend to retain traditional ways of life in other parts of
the world, there is almost nothing to connect the region’s present with the
photographic images of the past. Only Central Asia’s superb but still-decaying
architectural monuments remain as visual keys linking modern Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan to the period of the Khanates and early Russian
empire. For the visitor of today, nineteenth century Central Asia seems to
exist only in museum displays of artifacts or in silvered photographs of
turbaned men and veiled women, bazaars, and camel caravans. The tropes of these
early images – their visual themes - define and limit both how and what is seen
in early photographs. The world they depict becomes unreal and irrecoverable.
Discussions of anthroplogical
photographs often impose a social science and/or a political framework for
interpretation of certain groups of photographs instead of exploring the more
abstract considerations of the meaning or essence of photography. The first
historical, event-driven approach provides a very useful methodology for
analyzing the photography of a certain period. There is no question, in this
method, of the existence of a “message” that is transmitted to the viewer. The
pre-existing cultural bias of the person seeing the photograph is a lens
through which the message is viewed. Essentially, the viewing and
interpretation of photography is considered within the same anthropological
framework as the photograph itself.
A flaw in this methodology lies in the assumption – perhaps a necessary
one – that cultural bias in the photograph (as the product of a specific
political and cultural era) and in the viewer (as the same) can be clearly
defined. This framework then establishes the limits of what can be seen in a
photograph.
An historical framework is absolutely
necessary to understand the photography of – for example – the early Soviet
period. The viewer was not there: he can only understand and interpret by
placing the photographer and his subjects in historical context as a first
step, and afterwards, look to the photographer’s use of the tools and arts
permitted to him at the time.
At times, when examining photographs
from Central Asia’s early colonial period, these limitations can be burdensome.
They may not always be necessary. A person immersed in the contemporary culture
of the region could interpret early photographs differently from other more
distant viewers. It is possible to see the photographs - not with the eyes of a
Central Asian of the nineteenth century, but as a neighbor who speaks his language.
In Afghanistan, particularly in the Uzbek and Turkoman towns of Tashkurgan and
Aqcha, there was not a great deal that had changed in the visual tropes between
nineteenth century Central Asia and the 1970s. Simply by removing a bus and a
telephone pole or two, one could be in Andijan or Kokand in 1900. The physical
objects present to the eye were consistent with those of nineteenth century
photographs. Gesture and pose in nineteenth century photographs are also
familiar to me because of my experience in Afghanistan. Greater familiarity
with a more modern, if still traditional world, can give the viewer greater
security in interpreting the photographic scene and in understanding what has
changed and what remains the same. People in Uzbekistan today no longer sit or
stand or greet each other the way that Afghan Uzbeks do; they have been trained
by generations of Soviet schooling, television, and the movies to behave in a
way unthinkable to their great-grandparents. They also have a completely
different understanding of what it means to be watched, documented, and
photographed.
Mere familiarity, however, does not enable one to
understand photographs more accurately or with greater “truth.” No one can see
with another’s eyes, much less into the past. I had a personal lesson in this
more than thirty years ago. I worked with women weavers to reproduce nineteenth
century rugs on a Turkoman family farm in the steppe north of Tashkurgan,
Afghanistan. Most of the women there had never owned an illustrated book or been
to any large town where photographic images were commonly displayed. I showed
black and white photographs of old carpets to the weavers. They said, “These
must be carpets that have lost their color in the sun.” Many could not
recognize themselves or family members in the two-dimensional images of
Polaroid photographs until they had looked at them for four or five minutes.
Their eyes
were highly trained in other ways, however. I gave the women an extremely
elaborate, highly irregular, design template of a carpet to be woven. They
looked at it for two days, and then insisted on returning the graphed-out
cartoon. They were puzzled when I asked if they were not interested in doing
the weaving. No, they said, they just didn’t need the template any longer. Two
months later, they delivered the rug. It was an exact rendering of the
template, knot for knot, with the exception of a small area that they pointed
out to me, explaining that the design had been faulty, and they had corrected
and balanced it. After many years of working in Afghanistan, I had thought that
I understood a great deal about Central Asian design, its history, and its
evolution. At that moment, I realized that everything I thought I knew about
Central Asian art and visual perception was subjective, a projection of my own
cultural bias and the product of a far weaker understanding of the nature of
pattern. However hard I tried, I could never really understand what the weavers
understood, because I could never see with their eyes.
This consciousness of the relativity
of perception – of how differently people see, define, and remember what they
see - discourages me from accepting any particular interpretation of colonial
photography as absolute. Twenty-first century viewers often assume that they can
understand more, feel greater compassion and sympathy, and react more
intelligently to an image than viewers did in the past. I doubt that this is
true. I am not comfortable with the value-laden paradigms of dominant and
subaltern so popular in analyzing photography of the colonial period because I
cannot be certain how that perspective was seen at the time. This is not a
depressing thought, but a liberating one. By accepting that photography cannot
offer a single true picture of Central Asia, the corollary may be argued as
well: a photograph can provide the viewer with multiple, partial but still valuable
truths. No doubt, the photographs of the nineteenth century would have been
seen differently in the past, and future generations of viewers will appreciate
other qualities in them than we can see today. This essay merely attempts the
first steps of a chronology, identifying authorship, and examining usage. I
hope it will prove useful in future interpretations.
[i]
Major imperial period photographic publications
included Francis Frith’s Egypt and Palestine, Photographed and
Described, and John Forbes-Watson and John William Kaye’s six volume, The
People of India: A series of photographic illustrations with descriptive
letterpress, of the races and tribes of Hindustan, 1868-1872.
[ii] This perspective continues to
dominate documentary photography, even that which serves a “highbrow” art
audience. See The Americans series by
Swiss photographer Robert Frank. The series was published first in France and
portrays Americans as unsophisticated and comparatively uncivilized people,
living in a tasteless environment and driven by superficial, crass or base
desires.
[iii] James C. Faris, Navajo and Photography: a critical history of the
representation of an American people, (Albuquerque, NM: University of New
Mexico P, 1996) 14.
[iv] Compare Metz’ assertion that film captures life, but photography
confirms death. This clichéd interpretation of Imperialist programs is valid,
but also relegated to the emotional response of the viewer to an individual
photograph and individual subjects, rather than to the entire colonial
project.. The subjects of a photograph are not only “captured” in a moment in
time, they are trapped in it, bereft of future – but only within that
particular frame. See Christian Metz, “Photography and Fetish,” in
Over-Exposed: Essays in Contemporary Photography, C. Squiers, ed. (New York:
New Press, 1999 [1985])
[v] The antecedent to the colonial period documentary photographic
enterprises was France’s 1851 Commission des Monuments Historiques, the first
major architectural and archaeological campaign. The publication by Maxime du
Camp of Egypte, Nubie, Palestine et Syrie in 1852 was the “first
photographically illustrated travel book.”
Heather S. Sonntag, “Tracing the Turkestan Series – Vasily
Vereshchagin’s Visual Representations of Late 19th Century Central Asia,” MA
Thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Spring 2003, 65, 68, 77.
[vi] This nineteenth century attempt to use visual art as a propaganda tool
prefigured the many uses to which the visual arts were later put in order to
carry clear social messages to a little-educated population during the early
Bolshevik period.
[vii] David Elliot, “The Photograph in Russia: Icon of a New Age,” in
Photography in Russia, 1840-1940, David Elliot, ed. (London: Thames and Hudson,
1992) 12.
[viii] The first article appeared in the Severnaia pchela, The Northern Bee,
and stated, “We see no point in discussing the likely influence of this discovery
on art in the future; it is an invention which has only a practical
application.” Elena Barkhatova, “The First Photographs in Russia,” in
Photography in Russia, 1840-1940, David Elliot, ed. (London: Thames and Hudson,
1992) 24.
[ix] Elena Barkhatova, 26.
[x] Julius Fritzsche, “Report by Julius Fritzsche to the St Petersburg
Academy of Sciences on Ackermann’s apparatus and the work of Fox Talbot,” in
Photography in Russia, 1840-1940, David Elliot, ed. (London: Thames and Hudson,
1992) 30.
[xi] The flexible film was discovered by Ivan Boldreyev in 1878, some six
years prior to George Eastman’s work, but the process was not pursued. David
Elliot, 1992, 15.
[xii] David Elliot, 1992, 15.
[xiii] Levitsky was a prominent daguerreotypist who specialized in portraiture,
very active in scientific research, the commercialization, and the public
popularization of photography. David Elliot and Elena Barkhatova in David
Elliot, 1992. 15, 32.
[xiv] Elena Barkhatova, 26.
[xv] Elena Barkhatova, 35.
[xvi] For example, six hundred original Dudin negatives prepared for the
Paris World Exhibition were left with the Hamburg Museum. Vladimir Anatolevich
Nikitin, Rasskazi o fotografakh I fotografia “Tales of photographers and
photography,” (Leningrad: Lenizdat, 1991)
37.
[xvii] Boris Golender, Okno v proshloe, Turkestan na starinikh pochtovikh
otkritkakh (1898-1917), “Window on the past, Turkestan in antique postal
cards,” (Tashkent: 2002) 14.
[xviii] For a list of fifty exhibitions held between 1867 and 1915, either
specific to Central Asia or containing substantial amounts of Central Asian
materials, see Svetlana Gorshenina, The Private Collections of Russian
Turkestan, Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Century, ANOR 15, (Lausanne:
Martin-Luther-Universitat Halle-Wittenberg, Humboldt-Universitat Berlin,
Fondation du 450e Anniversaire de l’Universite de Lausanne, 2004) 66-67, 125-130.
[xix] James M. Reilly, Care and Identification of 19th Century Photographic
Prints, (Eastman Kodak, 1986) 4-27.
[xx] Svetlana Gorshinina, La Route de Samarcande, L’Asie Centrale dans
l’objectif des voyageurs d’autrefois, (Geneva: Editions Olizane, 2000)
216.
[xxi] Ergun Cağatay, Bir Zamanlar Orta Asya, Once Upon a Time in Central
Asia, (Istanbul: Tetragon, 1996) 7. I was able to see a small group of Murenko’s
original, much faded photographs in St. Petersburg. They were on display in a
cracked case in a damp, freezing hallway of the Institute of Material Culture.
[xxii] Murenko then moved to Saratov, where he opened a commercial
photographic establishment. Golender, 2002, 9.
[xxiii] For example, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov,
Smerdyakov’s passionate description of such a captive’s refusal to apostize
forms the core description of his character in the book.
[xxiv] In Russia, there had been far smaller but similarly conceived projects
like Mikhail Bukhar’s Album of Views and Types of the Orenburg Region, which
had been presented to Tsar Alexander II. David Elliot in Elliot, 1992, 16.
[xxvi] Gorshenina, 2000, 122-127.
[xxvii] For the library, Kaufman
commissioned what would become a 416 volume scrapbook to collect everything
written on the region; established the Turkestanskie Vedomosti, a Russian
newspaper, and the Turkestanskaya Tuzemenaya Gazeta, the Turkestan Native
Gazette, written in Uzbek. Richard A. Pierce, Russian Central Asia: 1867-1917,
A Study in Colonial Rule, (Berkeley: University of California P, 1960) 99-101.
[xxviii] Kaufman initiated the creation
of the Tashkent branch of the Society of Amateurs of Natural Sciences. Sonntag,
48. See also Vahan Barooshian, V.V. Vereshchagin: Artist at War, (Gainsville:
University Press of Florida, 1993)
[xxix] See M. I. Brodovsky, D L. Ivanov, I. I. Krause, A. Fedchenko, A. A.
Fedchenko, Catalog Turkestanskovo Otdela, (Moscow: Moscow Polytechnic
Institute, 1871)
[xxx] The painter Vasily Vereshchagin faced severe criticism for including
the paintings “The Forgotten Soldier,” “Surrounded! They’re Pursuing,” and “By
the Fortress Wall. They Have Entered,” in his Turkestan Series of works when
they were exhibited in St. Petersburg in 1874. He destroyed the paintings after
a private showing attended by the Tsar.
Sonntag, 89.
[xxxi] Kuhn himself excavated sites at
Khojent. Kuhn obtained many important works for Kaufman’s library, accompanied
expeditions to Khiva and elsewhere and gathered manuscripts, numismatic,
archaeological, and ethnological specimens for the Asiatic Museum, the Dashkova
Ethnographic Museum, the Moscow Society of Friends of the Natural Sciences, and
the Saint Petersburg Public Library. Gorshenina, 2004, 41-42, 75-76, 103.
[xxxii] Brenda Parker, “Turkestanskii Al’bom, Portrait of a Faraway Place and
Another Time,” Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, Fall 1983, 293.
[xxxiii] The Orientalist Lerch wrote a booklet of instructions for collecting
under Kaufman’s auspices with detailed instructions for collecting and
preserving manuscripts, locating archives, and included directions to make as many
written notes, site drawings, and photographs at the time of collection.
Gorshenina, 2004, 41-42.
[xxxiv] This is not surprising. At the time that the Al’bom was made, many
Turkoman regions were actively engaged against Russian troops. The Tekke
Turkoman tribe, one of the largest, ceased resistance only in 1878, after the
massacre at Geok Tepe.
[xxxv] These photographs of the wedding of ‘Hannah’ and ‘Mula Baruch’ were
core research for A. Z. Amitin Shapiro’s seminal work, “An Essay on the Legal
Mores of Jews in Central Asia,” ATICOT, 1931, as the were for me in 1995.
[xxxvi] Brodovsky, a collator of the Kaufman Turkestanskii Al’bom, also wrote
on craft traditions in Central Asia. Brodovsky et alii, 1871.
[xxxvii] The 1870s-1880s Kustar movement in Russia arose in response to rapid
industrialization and the loss of folk craft traditions throughout the Russian
empire. Kaufman’s dedication to craft documentation may have been influenced by
a growing awareness in Russia that valuable knowledge and traditions were being
lost.
[xxxviii] Svetlana Gorshenina suggests that seven were made. Heather
Sonntag is currently engaged in detailed
research on the Turkestanskii Al’bom in Moscow and Petersburg. She has found
evidence of only five of the full-size versions, but has made exciting
discoveries of smaller versions, her evidence to be published very soon.
Personal communication, Heather Sonntag, March 2006.
[xxxix] According to the Library of Congress catalog, the preliminary pages
were printed in St. Petersburg, volumes one, two, and four by the Voenno-topograficheskii
otdiel of the Turkestanskii voenni okrug (Military-Topographical Department of
the Turkestan District), and volume three by A. Argamakov, both presses in
Tashkent.
[xl] One now rests in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. How is
got to the LOC is still a mystery. Some sources state that is was purchased
from Israel Perlstein, a New York Dealer, in 1934. It may also have come to the
LOC as part of the Tsar’s Winter Palace Collection, acquired in the early
1930s. Parker, 294. Another copy of the Al’bom is in the collection of the
Navoi Library in Tashkent. According to Heather Sonntag, (citing Pierce, 1960,
317) one was printed for the Turkestan Public Library in Tashkent (established
by Kaufman), one for Tsar Alexander II, for General von Kaufman, for the
Rumiantsev Museum Library in Moscow. Pierce states that the Library of Congress
copy in incomplete, but in my comparison to the Tashkent copy, it appeared to
be in better condition and more complete.
[xli] Personal communication, Heather Sonntag, 2006.
[xlii] Gorshenina, 2004, 17.
[xliv] In addition to other works cited here, a major source for the appendix
of photographers working in Central Asia is in Gorshenina, 2004, 122-124.
[xlv] Some of Vvedensky’s work was published under the name of N. Petrovsky,
a educator and also a local photographer.
[xlvi] Boris Golender identifies several other “photographic masters” whose
signed work I have never encountered, among them a Captain I. A. Brezinsky, E.
Vilde (or Wilde) in Kokand, and V. Virvinski in Margelan. Golender, 12.
[xlvii] After the Revolution, Chistiakov was employed as a photographer at the
various incarnations of the St. Petersburg Institute of Material and was the
photographer for the Imperial archaeological commission in Samarkand. Vitaly V.
Naumkin, Samarkand, Caught in Time: Great Photographic Archives, (Reading, UK:
Garnet, 1992) 9.
[lii] Henri Moser, A Travers L'asie Central: La Steppe Kirghize, Le
Turkestan Russe, Boukhara, Khiva, Le Pays Des Turcomans Et La Perse -
Impressions De Voyage, (Paris: E. Plon, Nourrit Et Cie) 1885.
[liii] Gorshenina, 2000, 171.
[liv] See Emile Antoine Henri de Bouillane de Lacoste, Around Afghanistan
(D. Appleton, 1909)
[lv] Hughes Krafft, A Travers le Turkestan Russe, (Paris: Hachet, 1902)
[lvi] Gorshenina, 2000, 201-202
[lvii] See Kenneth White, Frontieres
d’Asie, Musee national des Arts asiatiques (Paris: Guimet, 1993).
[lviii] Gorshenina, 2004, 128.
[lix] Golender, 14 and Gorshenina,
2004, 128.
[lxi] Boris Golender supplies several
names, others were found on numerous examples of the postcards of the period.
See Golender, 16.
[lxiii] The sequence of available printing processes began with a monochrome
collotype. To make the early colored cards, transparent watercolor washes were
applied by hand with stencils. Lithography
was used early on, then asphaltum plates. Cylinder presses, and the
rotary presses that followed around 1900 and offset presses in 1908 continued
to speed processing time. A chromo-lithographic process was developed just
after the turn of the century to produce exceptionally fine layers and
definition of color. In each of these developments, the large German postcard
manufacturers were at the forefront of the field. Christraud M. Geary and
Virginia-Lee Webb, Delivering Views, Distant Cultures in Early Postcards,
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1998)
39-43.
[lxiv] Boris Golender bases this number in part on his personal collection of
over 2100 different cards. Golender, 17.
[lxvi] Many modernist Central Asians
advocated educational, social, and economic changes based not on the Russian,
but on the Turkish model. The Jadid movement was the most powerful expression
of modern Muslim thought in Central Asia, but was first co-opted and then
viciously attacked by the early Bolsheviks, who among other actions, closed all
Jadidist schools, banned teaching in native languages, and obliterated almost
the entire town of Kokand after attempts to establish an independent Turkic
democratic republic there.
[lxviii] Tashkent House of Photography, Introduction by Tursunali Kuziev,
O’zbek Fotografiyasi 125 yil, 1879-1940, (One hundred twenty-five years of
Uzbek photography), (Tashkent: Tashkent House of Photography, 2005) 8-10.
[lxxi] Dudin afterwards published “A Preliminary Account of a Journey from
Erdenitza to Kiazhta”, where, according to Bartold, “he described the ruined
buildings and ancient tombs, that were completely unknown in the literature of
Central Asia, among the number of architectural monuments of Central Asia.”
V.V. Bartold, “Vospominanie o S. M. Dudine,” Recollections of S. M. Dudin,
muzea antropologii I etnografii, Pamiati Samuila Martinovicha Dudina (In memory
of Samuel Martinovich Dudin), (Leningrad: Sbornik muzea antropologii I
etnografii, t. IX, 1930) 348.
[lxxiii] S. M. Dudin, “Ornamentation and the present conditions of the
Samarkand mosques”. Izvesti Arkh. Kom. VII, (Leningrad: 1903).
[lxxiv] Nikitin gives this date as 1895, but he also places Dudin in the
Ukraine in 1894. Karski more convincingly dates these works to 1898. Nikitin,
43-44 and E. F. Karski, in Muzea antropologii i etnografii, 1930, 341.
[lxxv] Dudin, S. M., "Pile Rug Articles of Central Asia," presented
by E. F. Karski at the meeting of the Department of Historical Sciences and
Phylogeny on April 21, 1926. Collection Studies of the Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnography, v. VII, Leningrad, 1928, S.71-155, translated by Elena Tsareva
in “Thirty Rug Masterpieces from the Collection of S. M. Dudin, Part I,”
Oriental Rug Review, Vol. 11/1. Also see
Elena Tsareva, “Samuil Martinovich Dudin, 1863-1926”, Hali, Issue 27,
July-August-September 1985.
[lxxvi] To give only a single example, Dudin made the only known early
photographs of the silk ikat binding process.
[lxxvii] The expedition was commissioned by the Russian Committee for the study
of Central and Eastern Asia.
[lxxviii] One product of Dudin’s studies was the work “Techniques of mural
painting and sculpture in ancient Buddhist caves and temples of western China,”
Collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, (no date available).
[lxxix] S.F Oldenburg, Muzea antropologii I etnografii, 1930.
[lxxx] Dudin was Secretary of both the
Turkestan Committee for the Academy of the History of Material Culture and of
the Radlov Circle at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, and in 1920
became the director of the museum. At the same time, also without pay, Dudin
took on the administration of the ancient Central Asian department and the
department of illustrations and the photography and plaster-casting
laboratories. He worked for the Geographical Institute, then at Leningrad State
University, at the State Academy of the History of Material Culture, and at the
Society of Artists Named for Kundji, where he was one of the members of the
constituent assembly and director of the library. Karski, 341-343.
[lxxxi] After the October Revolution, the fledgling Bolshevik state was
bankrupt, and sold many cultural assets abroad. Vneshtorg (the international
trade organization) and Gostorg (organization for internal trade) asked Dudin
to select and price of major lots of carpets for export. Bartold, 349.
[lxxxiii] Many are now located in the archives of the State Historical Museum,
Tashkent.
[lxxxiv] Robert H Allshouse, Photographs for the Tsar, The Pioneering Color
Photography of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii commissioned by Tsar
Nicolas II, (Garden City, NY: Dial Press, 1983)
xxi.
[lxxxv] Prokudin-Gorskii used hypersensitized plates to make contact prints
from which color photographs could be made. Allshouse, xiv.
[lxxxvi] Photographer to the Tsar: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii,
Library of Congress, December 9, 2003
<http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html>
[lxxxviii] Maillart not only traveled independently from Moscow to Almaty, and
then through the Taklamakan desert, she was a true adventurer, intrepid
journalist, and feminist as well as stunt-woman for Marlene Dietrich in the ski
scenes of the 1930 film, Der Blaue Engel. Gorshenina, 2000, 205-207.