The colour photographs of Sergei Mikhailovitch Prokudin-Gorskii

This topic was suggested to us by a reader. I had seen some of Prokudin-Gorskii's fascinating photographs before, but I hadn't realised to what extent he had made portraits of handsome Central Asian men ...

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) was an innovator in colour photography. In the early 1900's, he formulated an ambitious plan to document the Russian Empire in full colour. He wanted to educate the empire's young citizens of its vast and diverse history, culture and modernization.
Tsar Nicholas II supported this project, and in 1909-1912, and again in 1915, Prokudin-Gorskii completed surveys of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped railroad car provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

According to Wikipedia, "his process used a camera that took a series of monochrome pictures in rapid sequence, each through a different colored filter. By projecting all three monochrome pictures using correctly-colored light, it was possible to reconstruct the original color scene. Any stray movement within the camera's field of view showed up in the prints as multiple "ghosted" images, since the red, green and blue images were taken of the subject at slightly different times.
He also successfully experimented with making color prints of the photographs, but the process was complicated and slow. It was only with the advent of digital image processing that multiple images could be satisfactorily combined into one."

The resulting images give a unique insight to an era we are used to seeing in monochrome only.

The Library of Congress has made a large amount of his photographs of landscapes, architectural monuments, industry, transportation and people available on their site. Here is a small, unsorted selection of his portraits from the vast Russian Empire ... Click to see them larger.


A fabric merchant in Samarkand. Note the framed Koran page above the stall.


Georgian tomato merchant near Sochi.


On the Registan, Samarkand.


A tea room in Samarkand.


A shashlyk restaurant in Samarkand.


A shepherd outside Samarkand.


At the Salyuktin mines on the outskirts of Samarkand.


A carpenter in Samarkand.


Fat tail sheep on the Golodnaya steppe.


Nazar Magomet, Golodnaya steppe. Note the doggie!


A Turkmen man posing with a camel loaded with sacks, probably of grain or cotton. Camel caravans remained the most common means of transporting goods in Central Asia well into the railroad era.


A young Bashkir.


A Bashkir switchman near the town of Ust' Katav on the Yuryuzan River between Ufa and Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountain region of European Russia.


Packaging department, Borzhom (today's Borjomi, Georgia).


A man in a courtyard, place unknown.


A shashlyk restaurant, Samarkand.


Doctors in Samarkand.


Mullahs by a mosque, Azizia, Batumi.


A Sunni Muslim man of undetermined nationality in Dagestan.

Finally, here is a black and white photograph, which nonetheless has very interesting subjects ...


Barbers in the Registan, Samarkand.

Langston Hughes in Central Asia

Thanks to the blog Moscow Through Brown Eyes, I was inspired to dig up some nice photos of American poet Langston Hughes' travels in early 1930's Soviet Central Asia. The Yale University Library has an online exhibition of Hughes' life (1902-1967) for starters.

In 1932, Hughes boarded the S/S Europa with a group of African-American actors and writers on their way to the Soviet Union. Their purpose was to make a film about the plight of black people in the United States, but after long and fruitless meetings with the Soviet producers, the whole project was scrapped.

Hughes took the chance to travel around Soviet-controlled Central Asia, areas that usually were not accessible to Westerners but that interested him for personal and political reasons. Hughes wanted to find a positive example of a "coloured South" to contrast with the Jim Crow south of the US. He met African-American engineers involved in the modernization of the Soviet cotton industry. He also met the Hungarian intellectual Arthur Koestler, who at the time was a member of the Communist party, but had already begun to develop his critical eye for the system. Hughes was a Communist sympathizer, although no party member - for him the dream of racial equality was so important that he preferred to look away from the harsh realities of famine and oppression. His self-critical period would come later, after WW2.

That said... maybe he was just dazzled by all the chirayliq guys he met on his travels?

From Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library's Langston Hughes collection. Described as "Group photograph of unidentified men and women in Russia, possibly Uzbekistan". See the larger original here.

Young writers of Central Asia, Hughes in the middle. On the backside of the photo there are descriptions in Cyrillic, which the library hasn't bothered to decipher.

Hughes' surprise traveling companion, Arthur Koestler. View the whole image here, plus chicken. Apparently Koestler heard someone play jazz records (this article claims it was Sophie Tucker singing "My Yiddishe Mamme") at a guesthouse in Ashqabat and knocked at the door; imagine his astonishment to find the poet whose works he had admired already in Europe.

Karim Ahmadii is perhaps the name of this man who dedicated his portrait to Hughes in 1933.

This is what Hughes wished to see - a coloured man and a white man shaking hands. His superficial view of Soviet race relations is problematic but understandable from today's perspective. The photo is titled "Yusuf Nichanov".

Back in the United States, Hughes wrote an article on traditional Uzbek dance for Travel Magazine.

He especially admired the "teacup dance", which he simply called "raks" (from raqs, dance), and was intrigued by the batcha - danging boys dressed and made up like women. (More on traditional Uzbek dance here.)

And in case you thought Hughes only had an eye for the guy, here's Tamara Khanum, dancing teacher, first woman to perform without the veil in Uzbekistan. The fate of her colleague Nurkhon shows what a brave act this was.

Langston Hughes wrote about his travels in A Negro Looks at Soviet Central Asia, a short book reprinted as recently as 2006 in Bishkek. There is an interesting discussion about Hughes and the re-publication at the Registan blog.

Kazakhs vs. Turkmens!

Faceoff scene from the Kazakh movie Kek (Vengeance, 2006). The Kazakh tribe Aday and the Turkmen tribe Yomut are locked in a vicious circle of blood revenge. There's a love story, too, if you look closely...
Some more clips with spoilers: A summary of key scenes, and a dramatic dombra moment. The film takes up some important motifs in the Kazakh storytelling tradition: the Turkic legend about the mankurt, and the importance of the dombra for (especially masculine) identity, memory and tradition.
Pity about the Russian dub, though...

Hope for Turkmenistan?

The President of Turkmenistan, Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, is currently dismantling the personality cult of former president Saparmurat Niyazov. Although Western analysts remain sceptical of the new regime, I hope the citizens of Turkmenistan will be able to breath a little bit more freely now. (The photo is from the presidential inauguration ceremony, February 14th 2007.)

Racial stereotypes for Soviet policemen

Click to enlarge. This was sent to us by reader Ilshat Nazipov (unfortunately, he didn't include any nice photos of himself ... see his homepage).

It's a diagram of how males of different races in the Soviet Union supposedly look, used by Soviet police to identify nationalities.

It's funny how the 'Tatar' looks just like Lenin, though Tatars weren't such a prominent part of his very mixed ancestry ("Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, German and Swedish, and possibly others", according to biographer Dmitry Volkogonov.) It's strange that the 'Georgian' doesn't look exactly like Stalin (probably because this was post-thaw, when the Soviet regime had distanced itself from Stalin). I wonder if it's a pure coincidence that the 'Tatar', the 'Jew' and the 'Gypsy' are next to each other. And we suspect that when the artist got to the 'Tajik' and the 'Turkmen', it was already close to deadline or the end of his workday, so he just drew something random - that's why they look a bit more imaginative than the others.

Ainur can't get over how cute the 'Jew' is.