Photographing, Exploring and Exhibiting Russian Turkestan: Central Asia on Display

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.

Inessa Kouteinikova, PhD is an independent art and architecture historian and curator. She studies colonial Central Asia, Russian and International Orientalism, and the development of the photographic industries in Russian Turkestan, Caucasus and the Crimea from 1860-1917.