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This volume addresses new theoretical approaches in visual and memory studies that prompted to rethink of the photography of Russian Turkestan of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Attempts to relate the visual unknown documentations to postcolonial criticism also opened up new interpretive arenas, helping to decentralize the analysis of the history of photography. The aim of this volume is to interpret photography as a specific tool that reifies reality, subjectively frames it, and fits it into various political, ideological, commercial, scientific, and artistic contexts. Without reducing the entire argument to the binary of ‘photography and power’, the authors reveal the different modes of seeing that involve distinct cultural norms, social practices, power relations, levels of technology, and networks for circulating photography, and that determined the manner of its (re)use in constructing various images of Central Asia. The volume demonstrates that photography was the cornerstone of imperial media governance and discourse construction in colonial Turkestan of the tsarist and early Soviet periods. The various cases show the complex mechanisms by which images of Turkestan were created, remembered, or forgotten from the nineteenth until the twenty-first century. The book should appeal to scholars of the Russian Empire and Central Asia; of history of photography and visual culture; of memory studies. It should be appropriate for use in upper-level undergraduate courses, and even a broader public.
This book illuminates the crucial role photography played from the very beginning of the Russian colonial presence in Central Asia and its entanglement with the orientalist legacy that followed. Inessa Kouteinikova examines these under-studied materials while also addressing the photographic market and reception of photography in the Russian Empire, the position of the popular press, the place of public exhibitions and emergence of the first ethnographic museums that took pace from Moscow to Tashkent during the time of the Russian conquest. This book embraces the dominant mode for representing the new colonial territories in the mid-late-19th-century Russia, by outlining the technical, commercial and artistic milieus during the Golden Age of Russian orientalism. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, history of photography and Russian studies.
A survey of the social, political, economic and artistic development of photography in Central Asia from its inception in the mid 19th century to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The article covers the development of photography in Russia proper, early photographic processes, and photography's rapid commercial development and public popularity. It describes the Russian conquest of Central Asia and the beginning of photographic documentation by photographers accompanying military forces, as well as large-scale commissioned projects such as the Turkestanskii Albom. Moving into the Romantic Era of commercial and “travel” photography, the article identifies the most important photographers and their distinguishing styles, including Russian, French, Swiss, and Central Asian photographers. It describes the development of the commercial postcard, pictorialism, early color photography by the innovator S. M. Prokhudin-Gorski, and finally the move into the Modernist period just prior to the Revolution. The article identifies the overlapping “messages” in Central Asian photography of the Imperial period. These include an Orientalizing program that stereotypes and barbarizes Central Asian peoples by presenting them as noble but childlike or else ruled by debased passions, an ethnological or archaeological perspective that fixes Central Asia in time, usually showing a moribund region of crumbling architecture and people in stasis, a results-oriented perspective that depicts the modernization achieved through Russian conquest and domination, and 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.
This introduction to Central Asia and its relationship with Russia helps restore Central Asia to the general narrative of Russian and world history.
A fantastic collection of Soviet Asian architecture, many photographed here for the first time Soviet Asia explores the Soviet modernist architecture of Central Asia. Italian photographers Roberto Conte and Stefano Perego crossed the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, documenting buildings constructed from the 1950s until the fall of the USSR. The resulting images showcase the majestic, largely unknown, modernist buildings of the region. Museums, housing complexes, universities, circuses, ritual palaces - all were constructed using a composite aesthetic. Influenced by Persian and Islamic architecture, pattern and mosaic motifs articulated a connection with Central Asia. Grey concrete slabs were juxtaposed with colourful tiling and rectilinear shapes broken by ornate curved forms: the brutal designs normally associated with Soviet-era architecture were reconstructed with Eastern characteristics. Many of the buildings shown in Soviet Asia are recorded here for the first time, making this book an important document, as despite the recent revival of interest in Brutalist and Modernist architecture, a number of them remain under threat of demolition. The publication includes two contextual essays, one by Alessandro De Magistris (architect and History of Architecture professor, University of Milan, contributor to the book Vertical Moscow) and the other by Marco Buttino (Modern and Urban History professor, University of Turin, specializing in the history of social change in the USSR).
In Samarkand, Khiva, Bukhara and Tashkent, Dominic Ambrose takes a journey to the sources of the Silk Road. These photographs were taken in the late 1990s at marketplaces, town squares and in the shadow of ancient monuments, where the traditional and the modern come together as food vendors, street performers and artisans gradually step into a post-Soviet era. Printed in traditional book form, they appear fixed in their time and cultural space. The N2 photography series will use Twentieth Century print media to showcase images from that era. The unique experience of viewing illustrations on paper was a hallmark of Twentieth Century mass pubication and became the standard method by which millions of people became familiar with the world beyond their own towns. Newspapers, magazines, advertising and textbooks all used black and white photography to such a wide extent that people learned to ignore the limitations and feel a direct connection to the scenes depicted. What now seem like quaint, distant artifacts from a more clumsy age were in their time, the epitomy of communication. N2 photography aims to recreate that feeling of connectedness, and to repropose the newsprint photograph as a viable aesthetic experience. The 1990s proved to be a challenging time for Uzbekistan and all of Central Asia. Not only did the economics of communism leave the country impoverished and ill placed in the modern world, but also with an irrelevant social structure as well. What would replace the Soviet ideals, hierarchies and values, all based on failed European models? This land of ancient traditions came out of the Soviet era with a sense that its bonds to its native Uzbek culture had been severly damaged by 70 years of Bolshevik rule. There was a feeling among much of the Uzbek elite that traditional bonds needed to be reinforced, while at the same time, a new modern identity had to be created. When Dominic Ambrose visited the country in 1997, as part of the government's UMID scholarship program, these new goals were being implemented as state policy, and the effects were everywhere.
This is a 3-volume set of oversize books that span the continent of Asia. Ancient and beautiful traditions in Asia that are rapidly disappearing are recorded here in 9,000 images on 1,000 pages. The author has visited 35 countries in Asia and has travelled to the end of the road in its most remote places to capture the costumes, architecture, festivals, and lifestyles that are vanishing. The diverse cultures range from Turkey in the west to Japan in the east, from Siberia in the north to Indonesia in the south, and everything in between. Volume 1 covers West Asia, Volume 2 Central Asia, and Volume 3 East Asia. Every one of its 1,000 pages is uniquely designed, and every one of its 9,000 images is captioned. This is an ambitious and extreme passion project that the author/photographer has worked on for 49 years. Many of the scenes depicted in the book are now gone from the world, and others are becoming rarer by the day. There is no other book like it.
In this comprehensive account of the culture and history of Central Asia, Edgar Knobloch describes the main centers of the age-old civilization. Throughout the book he spices the text with quotations from the works of contemporary travelers, while providing an expert's commentary on the archaeological, architectural, and decorative features of the sites he describes. His original photographs are supplemented by numerous line drawings, plans of the main cities, and sketches of principal monuments and their ornamental features.