Agitating Images Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia 1st Edition by Craig Campbell ISBN 0816681066 978-0816681068

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Product details: 

ISBN 10:0816681066 

ISBN 13:978-0816681068

Author:Craig Campbell

Following the socialist revolution, a colossal shift in everyday realities began in the 1920s and ’30s in the former Russian empire. Faced with the Siberian North, a vast territory considered culturally and technologically backward by the revolutionary government, the Soviets confidently undertook the project of reshaping the ordinary lives of the indigenous peoples in order to fold them into the Soviet state. In Agitating Images, Craig Campbell draws a rich and unsettling cultural portrait of the encounter between indigenous Siberians and Russian communists and reveals how photographs from this period complicate our understanding of this history.

Agitating Images provides a glimpse into the first moments of cultural engineering in remote areas of Soviet Siberia. The territories were perceived by outsiders to be on the margins of civilization, replete with shamanic rituals and inhabited by exiles, criminals, and “primitive” indigenous peoples. The Soviets hoped to permanently transform the mythologized landscape by establishing socialist utopian developments designed to incorporate minority cultures into the communist state. This book delves deep into photographic archives from these Soviet programs, but rather than using the photographs to complement an official history, Campbell presents them as anti-illustrations, or intrusions, that confound simple narratives of Soviet bureaucracy and power. Meant to agitate, these images offer critiques that cannot be explained in text alone and, in turn, put into question the nature of photographs as historical artifacts.

An innovative approach to challenging historical interpretation, Agitating Images demonstrates how photographs go against accepted premises of Soviet Siberia. All photographs, Campbell argues, communicate in unique ways that present new and even contrary possibilities to the text they illustrate. Ultimately, Agitating Images dissects our very understanding of the production of historical knowledge.

Table of contents: 

1. The Years Are Like Centuries
   The litany of place names and territorial monikers in this book will probably be daunting for those not familiar with Siberian history and geography. To simplify the task of reading this work, I will set the scene with the help of a few maps. These maps are meant to orient the reader within the book’s dense geographies—produced through descriptions and depictions as much as through the reader’s own experience and expectations. The first and most general term I use here is central Siberia. Central Siberia is a loosely defined zone surrounding the geographical center of the Russian Federation…
2. Dangerous Communications
   Archival photographs are like any artifact consigned to a museum, archive, library, or collection—whether they are carefully wrapped, labeled, and placed in archival-grade boxes, or casually stacked in a corner amidst other historical debris. They lie mostly unknown and ignored until a day comes when they might be pressed into service. Archival photographs are brought into the light by someone preparing a monograph, research report, calendar illustration, slide show, exhibit, article, or argument, and then circulated and seen in ways that neither the camera operator nor the photograph’s subjects could ever have anticipated…
3. Conclusion: Ethics of Presence and the (De)generative Image
   Photography in the practice of history and cultural theory has consistently proven to confound interpretation as a generic category. It is apprehended along a spectrum of positions that see it alternately as a transparent reflection of the world and a fabricated cultural text. As I have shown in this book, whatever its ontological status, the photograph is implicated in historical discourses as a significant witness attesting to the everyday. As a resource in the production of historical narrative, it is much like any other document…

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Tags: Craig Campbell, Agitating, Images, Photography