Camera Caucasica. Networks of Photographic Practices (...)

The book examines the networks of photographic practices in the Caucasus at the intersection of power and rule of the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian empires in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Gutmeyr-Schnur not only uncovers numerous previously overlooked facets of the local history of photography in the Caucasus but also integrates these into a global history of technology, thereby bringing a seemingly peripheral region to the center of a global research field. The author describes the convergence of global influences and local traditions, which ultimately translated into regional variations of photographic practices. Although the camera acted as an equalizer, as the technological conditions were largely identical and simultaneously available worldwide, the book demonstrates that photographs are ultimately the result of complex and entangled networks of cultural traditions, political developments, and economic processesnetworks that are continuously and differently reassembled in every region of the world. Camera Caucasica tells stories of Italian mountaineers, Austrian art historians, Swedish oil barons, Georgian nurses, Armenian court photographers, and Russian anthropologists, who together shaped the development of photography in the Caucasus. This represents a central aspect of the books effort to present both the history of photography and that of the region as a whole not through historical approaches centered on the nation state, but through cross-border collaboration and entanglement. The reading of the book transports the reader into the history of local railway construction in the late 19th century, to the world exhibitions between Paris and Chicago, to large-scale projects of photographic self- representation at the courts of St. Petersburg and Istanbul, to the oil fields near Baku, to medieval ruins in eastern Anatolia, and to the highest peaks of the Caucasus Mountains, ultimately explaining why certain photographs were taken exactly there.