Inventing the “Camera Caucasica”: Photography, Power, and Knowledge across Three Empires

Abstract

This review examines Dominik Gutmeyr-Schnur’s monograph Camera Caucasica: Networks of Photographic Practices in the Transimperial Caucasus. The book reconstructs the visual history of the Caucasus by tracing professional, academic, and technological networks in the region during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses on how modern and traditional visual cultures across the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian empires helped shape an enduring image of the “Caucasus.” Drawing on visual anthropology, science and technology studies, history, and postcolonial critique, Gutmeyr-Schnur presents the “Camera Caucasica” of this period as a social and political actor embedded in networks of social, cultural, eco-nomic, and political relations extending across the globe.