Kuznetsov’s Photographic Practice and Imperial Russia’s Eastern Territories

Imperial visual culture from Eurasia is crucial to global critiques of whiteness. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the inconsistent yet consequential boundaries between race, ethnicity, and nationality that characterized Russian rule. The contradictions of racial thinking impacted expansionist projects throughout Russia’s vast territories in ways that were particular to each region, yet can be considered part of broader, trans-imperial processes through the construct of whiteness. Two photographic albums by Alexei Kuznetsov (1845–1926) reveal the contradictory nature of the hierarchical management of human diversity in eastern Siberia. This paper examines Kuznetsov’s photographs of forced labor camps in Nerchinsk alongside lesser-known images of his atelier and the surrounding commercial development. His body of work contributes to a broader investigation into how photography and visual culture shaped understandings of race in the late Russian Empire’s eastern territories.