The Lenses of Time. The Indigenous Peoples of the Lower Amur and Sakhalin in the Visual Complex of Ethnography
Ethnographic photographs, museum displays, applied art exhibitions, and documentaries create a visual complex of ethnography, which not only preserves the memory of the captured time, but also bears evidence of the logic of the people who created it, as well as their academic ideas and social contexts. This study analyzes a visual complex of cultures of the indigenous population of the Lower Amur and Sakhalin. These materials were collected in the first third of the twentieth century and are found in museum collections and storages, archives, etc. The author focuses on the photo collection of the Eastern detachment of the Tungus expedition, which worked in 1927 and 1928 under the leadership of A. B. Kuftin in the Lower Amur region and Sakhalin. The interest to this expedition has been generated by the sharp changes that happened in the second half of the twentieth century. It was a time of big changes not only in the life of the indigenous population, but also in the field of academic approaches to ethnography. Considering the visual complex as a text (given its communicative significance) having its specific features, the author attempts not only to “read” the information, but also to determine the patterns and understand the logic of its creation.