Camera Caucasica. Networks of Photographic Practices

Historians of early photography have mostly relied on categories and methodologies borrowed from art history and thus considered the (single) images for their aesthetic qualities as the results of a particular photographers mastery of the art. These approaches however disregard the importance of numerous other actors and entities in the production of photographs. Interpreters and entrepreneurs, academic and cultural institutions, but also the technological advancement in the sector of cameras and chemicals have for instance all played a role in the development of photographic practices. Exploring the role of these actors thereby allows to consider questions related to intent, context, and production and makes the networks that stand behind a photograph visible. Scholars who have moved beyond these traditional art historical approaches to photography have contributed to a better understanding of the relationship between local pictorial traditions and global processes an understanding we have for various parts of the world but not yet for the Caucasus. The project aims to fill this gap and investigates the social, cultural, economic and political dimensions in photography for a part of the world to whose historical complexity and dynamics only few regions can stand up. Furthermore, studies on the history of photography often build on an understanding of nationality as a defining feature and suggest that the images in question would be the reflection of a particular groups national character. By focusing on the transimperial and transnational connections instead, the project will have a strong impact on our understanding of how local photographic practices can be translated into a global context. It thereby offers space for dialogue on entangled histories in a nationally contested area. It is the first individual study that looks to map the entanglement of photographic practices in the regions adjacent Russian, Ottoman and Qajar empires in the 19th and early 20th centuries and connect it to a global history of photography. For this aim, Dr. Dominik Gutmeyr-Schnur has joined UCLAs Center for Near Eastern Studies, which is led by Prof. Ali Behdad, one of the most renowned scholars of the history of photography in the Near East.

The project investigates the networks of photographic practice in the Caucasus at the intersection of the spheres of power and rule of the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As can be read in the book of the same title (Camera Caucasica: Networks of Photographic Practices in the Transimperial Caucasus, 2026, Academic Studies Press), the project not only brings to light numerous facets of the local history of photography in the Caucasus that have so far received little attention, but also integrates them into a worldwide history of technology, thereby moving a supposedly peripheral region to the center of a global field of research. The project shows how global influences and local traditions converge and, in combination, ultimately resulted in regional variations of photographic practice. For even if the camera largely functioned as a leveler, insofar as the technological preconditions were for the most part identical worldwide and available simultaneously, the project was able to demonstrate that photographs are ultimately the outcome of complex, intertwined networks of cultural traditions, political developments, and economic processes - networks that are continuously and differently reassembled in every region of the world. Among other things, the project tells of Italian alpinists, Austrian art historians, Swedish oil barons, Georgian nurses, Armenian court photographers, and Russian anthropologists who, in interplay, shaped the development of photography in the Caucasus. In the project's publications, the reader can discover the history of local railway construction in the late nineteenth century, the world's fairs between Paris and Chicago, large-scale projects of photographic self-representation at the courts of St. Petersburg and Istanbul, the oil fields outside Baku, medieval ruins in eastern Anatolia, and the highest peaks of the Caucasus Mountains - and can trace why, in precisely those places, which photographs were taken, and when. From this, an innovative approach follows for both the history of photography and the history of the Caucasus: to present them not through national-historical approaches, but through cross-border collaboration and entanglement. In doing so, "Camera Caucasica" also sets new emphases in decentering established fields of research such as Eastern European history, and constitutes a plea to write global history starting from purported peripheries, such as the Caucasus region.