Mother and children, Kovran
Boy with two girls, Milkovo
Dinner table at the Tomlans, Ksirganik
Nadia and Fedia's potato harvest, MilkovoI love Fedia's three piece suit just for arabel labour!
Nadia with milk, Milkovo
Salting cabbage
Pregnant girl on the road, Verkne Kamchatsk
Kniazev Brigade engine repair
Politician at Kamchadal Heritage Festival Wonder if we'd get Gordon Brown doing this?
Card game at fishing camp, Kirganik
Three girls on Friday nightGreat picture and opportunity to contrast with Western girls' Friday night outfits. I notice that even though these girls live in what more central Russians call "the backwater" one is wearing a D&G hoodie and the other an Adidas one.
Caviar buyersWhere are they headed?
Cook at seasonal fishing camp, Ust Camchatsk
Junkyard Guard.
School girl with briefcase.I love the girl's suitcase & how utterly freezing she looks.
Fathers and sons at work site, Milkovo
Grandmother, Kovran.Rockin' some cool specs.
Kniasev brothers, fishing, MilkovoThese photographs were all taken in Milkovo-in-Kamchat on the river's edge. (Postcode: 324960).
Most in the US who have heard of Kamchatka at all know it as a good place to launch an attack on North America the cold war board game Risk. Russians consider the region the consummate backwater; the provinces are one thing, but Kamchatka is beyond provincial. It is beyond Siberia, beyond everything, on Russia’s Pacific, about a thousand miles north of Japan.
My first visit to Kamchatka was in 1993. I helped to organize a conference for indigenous people from around the peninsula; I came home months later with some Polaroids and a tiny enamel pin showing a map of Kamchatka with the slogan "It’s a strange place.” Over the next decade I made numerous visits, once spending a year living in the village of Milkovo along the central Kamchatka River valley. I was drawn to the ongoing revival of indigenous traditions, and especially to the vast range of ideas about indigenous identities, histories and the meaning of culture. I spent most of my time with Kamchadals, a self-described “creole” group, part indigenous Itel’men, part Russian. I began to learn everything I could about their efforts to gain official recognition as a mestizo ethnic group.
I split my time between archives, fishing expeditions, government offices and children’s culture troupes. Drawing on 300 years of history, I came across endless confusion about ethnic categories. Some writers worried that Russian peasants, far from taming new lands, had simply gone native; others lamented the demise of traditional culture. Had the Russians gone native? Was native culture lost to colonialism? How should the emerging hybrid be categorized? I gradually adopted the idea of “Kamchadal Texts”; the term applies to any scrap of data that speaks to these questions. Archival photographs and documents are Kamchadal texts, as are interview excerpts and my own photographs. The enamel pin is a Kamchadal text. As I considered these questions, I gathered an aggregate archive of answers. Each of the “texts” speaks to Kamchadal history, to contemporary lived experience, to memories of earlier identies, to experience of travel and travel writing. None in itself provides a complete answer.
by Nelson Hancock
Kamchatka: Photographs of Russia's Far East
Most in the US who have heard of Kamchatka at all know it as a good place to launch an attack on North America the cold war board game Risk. Russians consider the region the consummate backwater; the provinces are one thing, but Kamchatka is beyond provincial. It is beyond Siberia, beyond everything, on Russia’s Pacific, about a thousand miles north of Japan.
My first visit to Kamchatka was in 1993. I helped to organize a conference for indigenous people from around the peninsula; I came home months later with some Polaroids and a tiny enamel pin showing a map of Kamchatka with the slogan "It’s a strange place.” Over the next decade I made numerous visits, once spending a year living in the village of Milkovo along the central Kamchatka River valley. I was drawn to the ongoing revival of indigenous traditions, and especially to the vast range of ideas about indigenous identities, histories and the meaning of culture. I spent most of my time with Kamchadals, a self-described “creole” group, part indigenous Itel’men, part Russian. I began to learn everything I could about their efforts to gain official recognition as a mestizo ethnic group.
I split my time between archives, fishing expeditions, government offices and children’s culture troupes. Drawing on 300 years of history, I came across endless confusion about ethnic categories. Some writers worried that Russian peasants, far from taming new lands, had simply gone native; others lamented the demise of traditional culture. Had the Russians gone native? Was native culture lost to colonialism? How should the emerging hybrid be categorized? I gradually adopted the idea of “Kamchadal Texts”; the term applies to any scrap of data that speaks to these questions. Archival photographs and documents are Kamchadal texts, as are interview excerpts and my own photographs. The enamel pin is a Kamchadal text. As I considered these questions, I gathered an aggregate archive of answers. Each of the “texts” speaks to Kamchadal history, to contemporary lived experience, to memories of earlier identies, to experience of travel and travel writing. None in itself provides a complete answer.
by Nelson Hancock
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