A Lineage of “Firsts:” Self-Representation by Uzbek Women Artists between Photography, Painting, and Poetry

This paper examines the role of photographs and other media in shaping the public personas of two trailblazing female artists in twentieth-century Uzbekistan. Celebrated as “one of the new women of the Soviet East,” Shamsroi Khasanova (1917-1956) was the first prominent indigenous female painter and the first female director of the State Art Museum in Tashkent in the 1940s. She was repeatedly photographed and written about as an exemplar of the success of policies targeting the emancipation of women, paramount to the Soviet modernization project in Central Asia. Was this a genuine investment in the politics of representation or a form of tokenizing that valued her image more than her work? A generation younger than Khasanova, the contemporary photographer and filmmaker Umida Akhmedova (b. 1955) was Uzbekistan’s first female camera operator. In 2010, she was convicted of slander against the Uzbek nation for her work centering women’s everyday lives and experiences. Akhmedova understands the camera as a tool of relation and resistance, observing, “when I shoot, I feel like I’m writing poetry.” Khasanova, too, turned to poetry as a framework for articulating subjectivity: she painted a series of imagined portraits of historical Central Asian female poets and musicians, as if to produce a lineage of predecessors for herself. After comparing self-portraits by both artists with depictions made by others, I explore how the framework of poetry enabled both artists to challenge fixed categories of identity.