Ekaterina Emeliantseva

Icons, portraits, or types?

Photographic images of the Skoptsy in late Imperial Russia

(1880–1917)

This article examines the photographic self-representation of the Siberian Skoptsy in late Imperial Russia and explores the ways they used the new media to realise their social aspirations. The studio portraits of the Skoptsy from the Bonch-Bruevich collection of the State Museum of the History of Religion (GMIR) in St Petersburg were characterized by the historical research as contemporary ‘ethnographic images’. The analysis of the images and of the inscriptions on the rear of the images, indicates, however, that those images were at first produced as ‘bourgeois portraits’. Further that it was only later, that those images were collected by an intellectual Skopets as research material for Bonch- Bruevich.

The Skoptsy, however, in producing those images, viewed themselves as within their own spiritual tradition and within the setting of the new style of bourgeois studio portrait composing their self beyond ethnographic or social exoticism.

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