KAMCHATKA’S IMAGES IN THE WORKS OF RESEARCHER BENEDICT DYBOWSKI
The modern sociocultural anthropology pays great attention to visual historical sources, in particular, photographs, drawings, films. The discipline of visual anthropology justifiably has taken a significant place in the West European scientific circulation, but in Russia, this field has been developed only fragmentarily. At the same time, visual anthropological practices in Russia have a rich history associated with expeditions to develop Siberian and Far Eastern regions, expressed in cumulating a corpus of historical photographs in regional archives that deserve researchers’ attention and introduction into scientific circulation. The materials created directly by professional researchers are of particular importance in this heritage. This article is devoted to one of them, so-called “Dybowski’s album”, a collection of unique photographs on the history of Kamchatka. The research work of Benedict Dybowski, an encyclopedic scholar who devoted a considerable period of his activity to studying and popularizing materials on Siberian and Kamchatka anthropology and zoogeography, is a poorly-studied page in the history of scientific development of the mentioned territories. The scientific novelty of the research consists in operating archival sources and focusing on the analysis of photographic heritage of the researcher and his colleagues. Many of these sources are introduced into scientific circulation for the first time. B. Dybowski’s photos, made in the classical manner without any special artistic delights, represent a special “look” of a foreign researcher on various life aspects of Kamchatka and adjacent areas. Studying “Dybowski’s album” as the explorer’s travel pages supplemented with materials from his biographers, allows merging photographic images gradually into a single collective image, which is an informative visual source of information on the history of the Far Eastern frontier at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries.