CONSTRUCTING AN ETHNIC IMAGE: APPROACHES TO VISU-ALIZATION OF HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL FACTS (ON THE EXAMPLE OF PHOTO DOCUMENTS FROM IVAN POLYAKOV’S COLLECTION)
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2021-1-180-200
The article examines the archival photo documents of the 1860s–1870s, stored in the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and graphic materials created on their basis. These images reflect the trends of the second half of the 19th century in the visualization of ethnic features. The desired effect was achieved both through various expressive means and by manipulating the recorded information via compilation, retouching and textual accompaniment. The author’s aesthetic vision of beauty and exoticism often dominated in these pictures. Saturation with visual information was more likely to attract clients to purchase such an image. The comparison of the original and secondary data shows how the artificial information content and the integration of aesthetic approaches were reflected in the specificity of ethnic representation. The careful investigation of specific im-ages suggests where to look for difficult situations, allows avoiding loose interpretation and supporting the conclusions with specific facts. The museum received Collection No. 106 from the scientist Ivan Polyakov. The collection of photos is heterogeneous and includes two sets of documents: (1) prints acquired from various photographers during trips across the Russian Em-pire: the Caucasus, Siberia, the Volga region, Kazakhstan; (2) prints of photos Polyakov took during his own expedition along the Ob River to study local people. The history of the collection demonstrates how difficult it is to find out the origin of a photographic document and then to study its content. An example of changing attribution for a set of six photos from the collection is considered in the text. This group of documents is interesting because it vividly demonstrates conventions in depicting gender and national differences. All the photos show the same man. However, in three of them, he presents three variants of the Samoyed male costume; in the oth-er three, two variants of the female costume. The attribution of the photos is not clear to date. It is known that they were displayed at the ethnographic exhibition in Moscow in 1867 as images of the European group of Samoyeds (Nenets people) from Arkhangelsk Province. However, in the museum’s collection, they are registered with the title “Ostyak and Samoyed Winter Cos-tumes”. We can see how this change of attribution is reflected in the illustration and text error in the book about travel across Russia by Otto Finsch and Alfred Brehm. In the second part of the article, photo documents are considered as a source for creating graphic art works, in particular by the artist Mikhail Znamensky. Three color drawings, whose objects he borrowed from the prints of Collection No. 106, are analyzed in detail. Znamensky combined the objects with visu-al data from other sources and created new works of his own. The artist placed earlier samples into the new pieces of art. As a result, the original context presented in the original source was lost or altered. People drawn from photographs were assigned activities they did not do or this information was not embedded in the original image. The author colored his images copied from monochrome photographs and chose the color of the clothes at his discretion. The characters taken from different documents and placed in the narrative of the combined pictures turned out to be connected with each other by different semiotic links and created contexts in the new plots. Thus, representing various phenomena and cultures, a community of characters and events from different-time documents was created. This gave rise to unification and created ethnic stereotypes. Undoubtedly, people who created such constructs were more than far from thinking about a conscious falsification of data and from understanding that, in the historical perspective, the analysis of their compilations can lead to false conclusions. Their work, which concentrated information, responded to the needs of their time; it allowed contemporaries to see the diversity of life, without reference to special literature.
Keywords: ethnography studies, Khants, Ostyaks, Nenets, Samoyeds, photography, visual anthropology, source criticism, museum collection
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Issue: 1, 2021
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 180 — 200
Downloads: 714