Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia
Agitating images: photography against history in indigenous Siberia, by Craig Campbell, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 2014, xx + 267 pp., US$27.00 (pbk), ISBN 978-0-816-68106-8Craig Campbell's book Agitating Images takes as its starting point the photographs that document the encounter between the indigenous peoples of Siberia and Soviet cultural engineers intent on portraying them as uncivilized and on chronicling their own attempts at civilizing Siberia. Rather than provide a linear account of this process, Campbell engages with archival theory to show the ways in which these photographs complicate our attempts to create a holistic narrative.The book is split into two main sections as well as a brief prologue and introduction. In the prologue, Campbell lays out his understanding of the role of the photograph in writing history: "photographs are agents provocateurs. They pose (or are posed) as media amenable to interpretation and the inscription of meaning, whereas in actuality they undermine meaning and interpretation and the ascription of meaning, by indexing the irreducible meaninglessness of the everyday" (xiv). Photographs, in Campbell's view, are not self-evident snapshots of an indexical truth, but deconstructive mysteries. Archives, too, are not mere repositories for collections of these celluloid truths, but capricious and labyrinthine problems.The book's first section, "The Years Are Like Centuries", deals with the setting up of the Soviet culture bases (complex Soviet entities, of which more later) and their various attempts at modernizing the ways of the indigenous Siberian people. Photographs documented native Siberians in their original state (as the Soviets saw it: impoverished, uncultured, merely subsisting) as well as Siberians receiving the benefits of Soviet ideology and welfare. The first section will likely be of use to researchers focusing on indigenous Siberia and Soviet attempts at social engineering, whether said researchers are interested in photography or not.If the first section establishes the facts and background of this situation, the second returns to the more ruminative, theoretical mode established in the prologue. It orchestrates an encounter between the photograph and the photographic archive that will be of interest to those concerned with philosophical figures such as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. As Campbell progresses to this second section, personal commentary begins to creep in: he describes aspects of his own work with archives; serial numbers on a stack of papers, files full of dog-eared photographs, illegible handwritten notes on their reverse. …