technical images and linear text

In this photo, we see a thickly bearded man in a white turban, wearing a blue robe adorned with leafy green plants and a number of medals. The robe is richly embroidered, cinched with two golden belts, and adorned with medals, epaulets, and a braid. Signifiers of military service, to be sure. The man has likely been an officer of some kind, and has ascended to a position of some power. His dress is not that of an enlisted soldier, and his build is not that of an active serviceman. He is heavy, verging on obese; his corpulent frame weighs upon his chair, which becomes an unseen and implicit presence beneath the folds of the man’s thick garment. Legs apart in the fashion of those of his stature, he wears black leather boots with a slight heel. One eye opened ever so slightly wider than the other, he presents an image of slightly dazed insouciance. He sits in front of a wall of plaster or stucco, in the space between two intricately-carved but mildly distressed wooden doors. His left hand – the photo’s right – is closed around the gilded scabbard of a long ceremonial sword. He is certainly posed, but in a naive and unfamiliar fashion, as though uncertain in his relation to the camera’s single eye. The bare walls and shadowless composition reveal no hint of time or place, and yet there is certainly something foreign about this image.

For the contemporary Western audience, this is a photograph steeped in otherness. We are presented with all the conventional signifiers that have long since melded together into an indistinct and diaphanous notion of the ‘oriental,’ or, more particularly, the moyen-oriental – the Middle East. The tight, concentric rings of the man’s turban; his dense, wiry beard; his ornate robe and archaic blade; all of these signify a specific (albeit unreliable and frustratingly reductive) notion of a certain ethnic, racialized Other. His complexion and bone structure seem likely Turkic, perhaps Persian or Mongolian, although such ethnic distinctions are likely beyond the grasp of the average North American interpreter of today, overshadowed as they are by the man’s evidently foreign accoutrements. With his right hand posed over his genitals, and his left hand clasped about that troubling second phallus, those of a Freudian bent might propose that the Other in this photo is overtly threatening to colonialist notions of masculinity.

Those of a Freudian bent would have had to wait for many years following the creation of this photo to bend in such a fashion, however, as our dear Sigmund was but fifteen years of age when it was taken. In this lies the most striking Otherness of the photo, the temporal otherness which lays bare the contingent and constructed nature of the ethnic other. This photograph, now encountered in a perverse digital medium, was taken by one Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (above) in 1911. Prokudin-Gorskii was granted a special dispensation by Nicholas II, the last Tsar of Russia, to travel around the entire Russian Empire, documenting what Nicholas evidently hoped would be his legacy. Of course, the true historical fascination with these photographs is expressly because Gorskii’s photographs were greatly overshadowed by that other notable event in the reign of Tsar Nicholas: its end. Only six years after this photograph was taken, the Bolshevik Revolution would sweep the Russian Empire and forever reshape Western notions of the great Asiatic empire and its people. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs thus constitute some of our only surviving visual contact with a pre-Communist Russia, all the more incredible for their vivid colour and absurdly high resolution (to speak in an anachronistic digital vernacular). Indeed, the subject of the photo in question, one Mohammed Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara, and last descendant of Genghis Khan to rule a nation, would find his tiny emirate overthrown by the Bolsheviks in 1920, a brief nine years after the creation of this photograph. A great deal of my fascination with Prokudin-Gorskii’s work stems from my awareness of what was to come, which, given my historical distance, constitutes almost a sense of dramatic irony. I know what’s going to have happened — and the Emir didn’t.

Thus, the allure of this photo comes from a trinitarian juxtaposition of ethnicity, history, and ephemerality, speaking through a discourse of saturation and hue which has come to signify the modern. The discourse through which the photograph speaks, however, is of preeminent importance in this case. I am oddly reminded of an old story arc in Calvin and Hobbes wherein Calvin’s father successfully convinces Calvin that the world prior to 1960 was in fact only black and white; the story is likely a familiar one to many, from any number of different sources. The phenomenological truth in such comedic little anecdotes is that our relation to history is necessarily a technologically-mediated one, and one which is also necessarily mediated by a number of archaic historical technologies. The entire notion of colour as expressed in ‘grayscale’ is the product of technology. Saturation and lightness have always been easier to capture than hue, but prior to the technological harvesting of photons, these abstractions of ‘colour space’ were simply inconceivable. The gray scale was the product of technological inadequacy, and yet it is no longer encountered as such. Why would there still be productions in black and white, but for the fact that the gray scale has become a signifier in itself, a connotative framing of the entire image as historical, archival material? The grayscale thus also breeds an implicit distance between the viewer and the subject of the photograph, almost a reassurance that history is indeed well and truly past. Thus, this image, when we know its age, becomes utterly compelling: the (relatively, in postmodern terms) ancient world speaks in the dialect of the modern. This is especially so when viewing the image on a computer screen: we can even see its digital resolution in the top of our browser window, and know that Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographic method has resolution equivalent to nearly ten megapixels.

When considered in its historical context, what might otherwise have been simply a nondescript picture of a Middle Eastern man takes on a number of new levels of signification, all of which operate simultaneously. The emir’s cocked eye might lead one to question whether he was already thinking of the future of his realm, for instance, which might lead us to certain other questions concerning his attitude towards the Russian photographer of the piece. Did he regard Gorskii’s expedition as a noxious colonialism, or was he pleased at the prospect of having his picture set down for posterity? What of his medals? In which battles were they won, and for what? Indeed, his entire costume raises interesting questions, not simply regarding its utility (what might that braid be for?), but also the position of ethnic groups vis-à-vis certain styles of dress. Like Rosler’s photographs of the native family, historical photographs of subjugated ethnicities recall a time when traditional dress was merely tradition, rather than reified and saleable Otherness. There is therefore a certain orientalist fascination with the Khan’s garb in the photograph, in that we can appreciate it in itself, without that nagging liberal self-consciousness that is endlessly questioning authenticity.

The other principal interaction of the photograph is between the everydayness of the colour snapshot, and the foreign, posed construction of Gorskii’s colour plates. Black and white photography not only signifies historicity, but it also signifies and generally accompanies a certain staid, constructed, and formal quality which is common to almost all photos of a certain era. Most historical photos to which we are exposed are black and white portraits, which largely adhere to the conventions of artistic portraiture, while most modern photos are ’snapshots’ or candid moments, which adhere to their own banal documentary logic. Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs took as long, and perhaps longer to create than other greyscale photographic processes of the era. And yet, the ‘in the world’ setting and vivid colour of the image means that it seems to follow the documentary conventions of modern photography more than most other photography of the early twentieth century. The effect is difficult to shake, even when one is fully aware that the photograph is necessarily a posed image which nonetheless speaks in the dialect of its era. Something about this image makes me feel somehow phenomenologically ‘closer’ to the subject than I feel when encountering black and white photographs of my own ancestors. Posed as they are according to archaic notions of elegant portraiture, something always rings false when I examine them.

And thus we see the true power of this photograph. When colour comes to signify the present, a history in colour underlines the ever-present presence of the historical. Black and white photographs present us with history as history, since the absence of hue has itself taken on a layer of signification. Since the absence of hue must signify the historical, its presence must signify the contemporary: and so, the immediate visceral impact of Prokudin-Gorskii’s work stems from the fact that it presents us with history, without any intervening time having passed. The history of the present is accomplished through the presence of history: a history in colour.

See ‘the image in question’ here.