Photography and Cultural Heritage in the Age of Nationalisms: Europe's Eastern Borderlands (1867-1945) (1st edition.)

This title examines the role of photography as a powerful language of expressing collective identities in Eastern Europe during the period of dramatic socio-political transformation associated with the slow rise of national and ethnic consciousness, the dawn of empire and the outbreak of the two World Wars.

From the 1867 All-Russian Ethnographic Exhibition to the war-time Nazi scientific surveys, the author looks closely at how photographic practices and records were applied, borrowed, appropriated, transmitted to exert or subvert power, and used as a tool in negotiating collective identities.

Discussing a wide range of little-known archives, libraries of scientific institutions, learned societies, and professional and amateur photographers, she focuses on those ambitious photographic projects which not only shaped the various national, ethnic or imperial identities but also went to the heart of the idea of Eastern Europe.