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Tolmacheva E. Early Photographic Documents and Ethnographic Discourse: The Photographic Heritage of William Carrick in the Collection of the MAE RAS

E. Tolmacheva
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the RAS
St. Petersburg, Russia
ORCID: 0000-0002-8715-359x
E-mail: toek@kunstkamera.ru

 

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ABSTRACT. The study of ethnographic photographic documents has become an established field of scholarly inquiry. Researchers, however, often confront a vast body of visual sources that, at first glance, appear to record historical reality directly, while the verification and interpretation of the information they convey remain highly problematic. An ethnographic photograph may be approached as an intertextual source, through perceptual analysis, or through other theoretical frameworks; in all cases, its study requires interdisciplinary knowledge drawn from multiple fields. Early photographic documents dating from the 1860s to the 1880s present particular challenges for ethnographic research. Although they are frequently assigned the status of ethnographic sources, their expressive strategies tend to privilege cultural exoticism over the precise recording of scientific facts. As a case study, this article examines the photographic collection of William Carrick preserved in the holdings of the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The specificity of Carrick’s work as a Russian photographer lies in his being among the first to document the population of European Russia while simultaneously reflecting Narodist ideas in his imagery. His photographs, grounded in representations of folk life, construct a composite image of a multinational empire. Carrick’s legacy demonstrates how visual images of national culture, seemingly familiar and easily intelligible, can generate distorted understandings of the past, entering mass consciousness and solidifying into iconic clichés through which later generations interpret historical culture.

 

KEYWORDS: ethnographic studies, visual anthropology, source studies, museum collection, photographic document, photographic archive

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8600-2026-1(31)-152-177
UDC 39 (=352.41) (470.621)

 

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