The Samarkand Everyday: Viktor Ufimtsev’s Search for the Orient

• In Event: Visual Media at Face Value: Non-Professional 20th-century Portraits and Photographs

Abstract

This paper examines the work of Viktor Ufimtsev (1899–1964), a Siberian-born visual artist who spent most of his life and career in Uzbekistan. Specifically, it focuses on the photographs he took during his first trip to Central Asia in 1923–1924, contextualizing them through analyses of his broader visual work and travelogue. Ufimtsev’s visual and textual narrative emerges at the intersection of several perspectives: the stereotypical “European” depiction of Uzbekistan as an “oriental fairy tale,” the official Soviet state discourse that framed the region as both “backward” and possessing transformative potential, and his reflections as a provincial artist grappling with his geographical distance from Soviet cultural centers and the economic instability of the period.

Author

• E L