V.3132, 4

Imprint: Paris. Ernest Leroux, Éditeur. Librairie de la Société Asiatique de l'École des Langues Orientales Vivantes, etc. 28, Rue Bonaparte, 28. 1879.

6 vols, bound in 3. 4th volume comprises the photographic atlas of ethnographical types of Russian Central Asia. Octavo, quarter leather and red cloth binding, 270 x 190 mm; 70 albumen print ethnographical portraits of Central Asian ethnic groups, mounted one to a page on card mounts, each subject photographed twice, in full face and profile, oval images; with an accompanying table supplying the ethnic group, name, age, place of birth and various physical details, such as height, colour of skin and eyes, etc.'This collection of anthropological types owes its origins to the generosity of General Kauffmann. During our stay at Tashkent, before leaving for Fergana, we suggested to General Kauffmann the production of an anthropological album of Fergana types. We chose this province, recently conquered by Russia, for two reasons: first, because it contained nearly all the tribes of Russian Turkestan; secondly, owing to its isolated position, we were more likely to find pure racial types there...The general supplied everything we asked for. The photographer Kazlowski, the best in Tashkent, travelled with us to Marghellan, the capital of Fergana, where we were to start work. Thanks to the kindness of General Abramoff, governor of the province, we speedily completed our project in under 15 days...'In the introduction, the author notes that the photographs were taken following the specifications of the African explorer Gustave Fritsch, who stipulated that photograph of this sort should fall into two groups: the first, portraits, which should show the body naked against a white background, to a uniform scale of one-eighth life-size and with a rule placed next to the subject. The second series should provide as comprehensive a record as possible of the cultural contexr and should illustrate all types of costume, weapond and domestic utensils, architecture, scenes of private and public life, transport, art, working life, etc. Because the second part of this programme had already been carried out on behalf of the Russian government in the series of albums produced by the orientalist A. L. Kuhn, the present work restricted itself to producing a series of ethnographical portraits of the various racial types of Fergana. Images of Kuhn's much more extensive series can be viewed online in the Library of Congress's copy of the albums at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/coll/287_turkestan.html.