Images of Kamchatka in the Visual Archive of the Ethnographer Elizaveta Orlova

Abstract

The article draws on archival findings to examine the body of visual materials collected by the Leningrad ethnographer and scholar of the Siberian North and the Russian Far East Elizaveta Orlova (1899–1976) during her trips to Kamchatka in the 1920s–1930s which was the period of the socialist development of the region. I attempt to analyze Orlova’s legacy in the context both of methodologies employed by the early Soviet ethnography of the North and of large-scale projects for the visual documenting of Northern culture that were launched during the period. I argue that Orlova’s visual work went in parallel with the traditional ethnographic description to provide the multifaceted image of Kamchatka rich in cultural and ethnic diversity. Orlova’s visual materials should be seen as representative of the ethnographic field photography that was developing in the USSR of the 1920s–1930s. They help us understand the dynamics and specifics of sovietization in the then faraway land and remain a valuable historical and anthropological source for scholarly inquiry.