From Ethnographic Photo to Propaganda Poster to Feature Film: Evolving Images of Indigenous Women of the North in Russian and Soviet Visual Media

• In Event: The Visual Representation of Women in Soviet Propaganda

Abstract

The paper explores representations of indigenous women in Russian Imperial and Soviet visual media, such as postcards, educational and propaganda posters. I will begin with a detailed analysis of a photograph of a Yakut woman taken during an ethnographic expedition in the early 20th century that was subsequently reproduced in a postcard format, a book illustration in a Soviet propaganda pamphlet, used in an educational poster in the late 1920s, and finally, in 2022, recreated in a feature film. I will then examine visual images of women of the North in Soviet educational and propaganda posters, focusing on the interplay between gender and ethnicity in the construction of these images. I will draw my analysis on the series of posters for school children, Peoples of the USSR (Moscow, State Publishing House, 1929), and posters issued by the House of Sanitary Education addressed to the inhabitants of the Arctic North that promoted a healthy lifestyle.

Author

• Natalie Charles