The Far East in Vladimir Arsenyev’s Photographic Works: A “Repertoire” of Images

Abstract

This article explores the peculiarities of the photographic perception of the Far East by Vladimir K. Arsenyev (1872–1930), a traveller and researcher who wrote dozens of valuable literary and scholarly works about the region and created brilliant photographic images of its natural and ethnic diversity. The authors refer to previously unpublished archival data and photographic collections kept in the Archive of the Amur Regional Studies Society in Vladivostok and connected with Arsenyev’s expeditions in the Far East. Arsenyev’s photographic archive contains over 500 negatives, plates, and unique photographs with ethnographic, archaeological, and geographic images of the Far East, as well as images of the sovietisation of the Far Eastern frontier. These visual materials transfer historical information and are of great importance for contemporary researchers, though they still remain unstudied and unsystematised. Referring to the ideas of Russian and non-Russian researchers about photographic materials as important messages about cultures, this work starts a new historiographic page on the visual anthropology of Russia in the early twentieth century. The topic of the visualisation of the region in Arsenyev’s work is considered in the context of bearers of knowledge about the Far East and key approaches to its photographing in the early stages of photography’s development. The authors systematise the “repertoire” of photographic images found in Arsenyev’s archive according to the thematic and chronological principles. Finally, they make a conclusion about the importance of Arsenyev’s activity for the visual representation of the Russian Far Eastern frontier during the period in question.