CBEES Advanced Seminar with Helena Holzberger, Assistant Professor at the Chair of Russian and Asian Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Speaker: Helena Holzberger, Assistant Professor at the Chair of Russian and Asian Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Discussants: Anne Gustavsson, Research Fellow at the Department of Culture and Media Studies, Umeå University, and Yulia Gradskova, Associate Professor in History, Senior Researcher at the Department of Gender Studies, Södertörn University, and Research Coordinator at CBEES.

Chair: Julia Malitska, Project Researcher at the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies and Research Coordinator at CBEES, Södertörn University.

Abstract: In many ways, 1924 was a pivotal year for the Soviet Union. In Central Asia, the first Soviet Socialist Republics emerged from the former colonies of Tsarist Russia. At the same time, in Moscow, the re-emergence of mass media provided a new catalyst for socialist modernization. Thus, photography - especially photojournalism - became crucial in documenting, representing, and driving social and cultural change. My research explores the intersection of these phenomena. I will discuss how, from 1924 to 1941, cultural critics, artists, and photographers in Moscow and Tashkent debated the representation of Soviet Central Asia through photography. Despite claims during the 1937 Great Exhibition of All-Soviet Photography that Soviet photographers had overcome Orientalism, I argue that they instead created a new and enduring distortion. My paper not only sheds new light on the history of Soviet photography and national policy but also challenges existing research on Russian Orientalism.

Helena Holzberger is an Assistant Professor at the Chair of Russian and Asian Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research focuses on the late Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in general and on cultural, visual, animal and maritime history in particular. In 2020 she defended her dissertation on Orientalism and the History of Photography in Tsarist/Soviet Central Asia, which she is currently turning into a book. Her new research topic is the emergence and global encounters of the Soviet merchant fleet from the perspective of the Republic of Georgia.