Picturing Central Siberia is a project aimed at the preservation and dissemination of visual archives from Siberia. The goal of this project is the study and representation of pre-industrial and early-industrial cultural history. It covers both pre-Soviet and Soviet eras and looks at indigenous siberian peoples, settler societies, missionaries, old believers, exiles, communists, socialist agitators, and everyone else who was on the scene during the momentous upheavals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The geographic emphasis, however, is on remote sub-arctic and arctic places. The visual archive of the siberian taiga and tundra from this era depicts rarely seen images of Evenkis, Sakha (Yakuts), Evens, Dolgans, and other indigenous peoples on the cusp of soviet industrialization.

The visual archive includes photographs, negatives, illustrated works, films, and other objects of material culture. They are preserved in local, regional, national, and private collections throughout Russia and Siberia. In many cases the collections are unordered and represent fractured collections from expeditions, censuses, projects, etc.

This project has grown out of an ongoing intellectual alliance with staff at the Krasnoyarsk Regional Museum of Local Lore (KKKM: Krasnoiarskii kraevoi kraevedcheskii muzei). We are currently working with the KKKM to preserve their collection of glass plate negatives by digitizing them.