Jottings from the Granite Studio

For those interested in Central Asian history, the Library of Congress has made available online a large collection of photographs from the 1860s. The original collection was compiled under the direction of Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman (1818-1882), the first governor-general of Russian Turkestan. The Russian had been steadily pushing into the region throughout the 19th century as part of the “Great Game,” and sacked the city of Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1867. By 1868, the region had been made a separate guberniya under Von Kaufman.

From the collection description:

Konstantin Petrovich Von Kaufman (1818-1882), the first governor general of Russian Turkestan, commissioned the albums to acquaint Russians and Westerners with the region. The Russian orientalist A.L. Kun (also spelled Kuhn) compiled the first three parts, and the albums were formerly referred to as the Kun Collection. The other compilers included M.T. Brodovskii, M.A. Terentyev, N.V. Bogaevskii and photographer N.N. Nekhoroshev. The Military-Topographic Department, Military District of Tashkent printed the lithographic parts of each plate. The production work was primarily done in St. Petersburg and Tashkent in 1871-72.

As a historian, I love old photographs, but it’s worth mentioning that colonialism didn’t always have to come bearing guns or bibles, sometimes even the lens of a camera or the researcher’s notebook could demonstrate the changing nature of power relations. The photographer and the photographed: one takes action, the other is a passive recipient of that action. The photographer or the researcher takes away the memory, the image of his subject…not even the image really, but the preferred perspective of the one taking the picture or doing the observing.

In any case, this fascinating online exhibit is divided into sections on architecture, ethnography, and trade, each with hundreds of photos and translations of the original Russian captions.
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top right: A cotton market
bottom left: An Uzbek woman