This photographic collection contains thousands of historical photographic images documenting the people, landscape and development of the Central Siberia between the late 19th early 20th centuries.

Overview of the theme of Siberian Indigenous Peoples

The Endangered Archives Project (EAP016) collection was specifically created to preserve, through the process of digitization,  documentary photographs of indigenous peoples and cultures in the Siberian Arctic and Subarctic.  The majority of these photographs were created in the first three decades of the 20th Century.  This represents a period of dramatic change for all peoples living in Siberia.  To the best of our knowledge all of these photographs were taken by people of European descent.  Indigenous Siberians were the subject of the photographs, not the photographers.  It is worth noting this as it points to specific power dynamics which bear further consideration.

The photographs document categories such as ethnic group, everyday life, and economy.  Categorizations can tell us much about the people taking the photographs.  In general the photographs were made in a mode typical of Imperial Surveys, part of the colonial and scientific endeavours of enlightenment Europe.

Indigenous peoples were generally thought, at this time, to be primitive and backward.  It was believed that human beings underwent social progression, similar to the idea of evolution.  Thus indigenous peoples were scene in this scheme to further behind on the road to progress than other peoples.  Many communists came to believe that some indigenous peoples in fact lived in a state of primitive communism.

In many ways, as exotic and Other (ie. different), indigenous siberians were natural subjects for photographers.  Whether the photographs were created for pleasure (as in the mpu collection) or for control (as in those pictures taken by geographers and state representatives) the exotic appearance and practices of people living in Siberia (indigenous or not) was of interest to European Russians.

All of the scanning that was done for this project was aimed at capturing images related to the lives of indigenous Siberians (thus we also considered landscape photographs, photographs of expeditions, etc.).  However, so as to avoid fracturing the groupings (as they have been collected in the archives) we were not extremely exclusionary.  The eap016 collection, thus, contains some pictures of urban scenes, churches and monasteries, museums, Old Believers, etc.  All of the images, however, represent pre-industrial scenes and the majority depict scenes directly related to the lives of indigenous Siberian peoples.