The history of photography in Kazakhstan begins with a specific date – 1854 – and a specific image – a double portrait of Fiodor Dostoyevsky and the Kazakh ethnographer Chokan Valikanov that was taken by an unknown pioneer during the writer’s period in exile at Semipalatinsk.
The next important date is 1874, which saw the publication of the album Views and Types of Western Siberia, the creation of Lidia Poltoratskaya, the wife of the governor of the region, which marked the start of ethnographic interest in the remote Asiatic periphery of the Russian Empire.
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