Anthropology and Photography at the American Museum of Natural History

Many scholars of anthropology and photography note the parallel development of both fields and as Alison Griffiths clearly states: “[p]hotography’s ability to produce objective and verifiable data was frequently asserted by anthropologists throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, especially within the practice of physical anthropology, concerned as it was with the systematic study and classification of physical man” (Griffiths: 93). It is among such photographs that the series I am working with would be readily classified but close examination of the photographs and their context illuminate myriad other meanings contained in such images.

The three images I am working with are photographs of the head and shoulders of a man from a three-forth’s angle, frontal, and profile view (cover image). These photographs are immediately recognizable as the style of photographs taken for physical anthropological purposes around the turn of the 20th century. The back of the mounted photograph page contains additional information to confirm such conclusions. On the backside of the photographs is written in designated fields “Koryak Man – Tapoka,” “Siberia,” “Bogoras,” and “1900.” Although the expedition field is left blank the location, date, and reference to Bogoras indicate that the photographs are from the Jesup Expedition and a notation as such on the front of the page confirms this. Original and current accession numbers can be found on both the front and the back of the photograph page. The photographs are certainly not original prints from over 100 years ago as they are mounted on new archival board and are not faded, thus the museum posses the negative from which they have made prints (confirmed through archival research). The 5 x 7 prints have minor dust and damage betraying the early technology utilized in making them. Fingerprints on the prints literally physically recall the hand of the producers of the images.

The information on the photographs begs background investigation of the Jesup Expedition, specifically Bogoras, and the Koryak people. I turn first to the Koryak as the people necessarily preceded the expedition (Koryak continued to exist subsequent to the expedition and continue to exist in the present) but in investigation of the images the two issues are intrinsically intertwined and ultimately link back to the museum in the present. I recount information relevant to the photographs in question while remaining vigilant to not drift too far away from the central focus on the photographs themselves. Information on the Koryak from the scholar Alexander King’s website is the most extensive information provided on the internet. It serves as an invaluable starting point to understanding both the Koryak people and the role the Jesup Expedition had on the community. The Koryak people reside on the Kamchatka Peninsula of northern Russia on what is known at the Koryak Autonomus Okrug. Much contemporary scholarship exists pertaining to the Koryak; mostly produced by King. Despite the long history of anthropological study of the Koryak various discrepancies in information points to a potentially complicated relationship between anthropologists and the Koryak. One such example of contradictory information pertains to the very definition of the Koryak people.

According to King the Koryak also refer to themselves by a variety of other names, including “Chuckchi” (King 2005). Additional information indicates that the Chuckchi and Koryak are different groups (Laurel, Mathé, and Miller 1997; personal communication). For the purpose of the study, because I am working within the AMNH I take their definition of the Koryak and Chuckchi to be different peoples.
The distinction of the Koryak and other tribes was one first made in the publication of original Jesup Expedition information (Jochelson 1908). This is a definition that stands within the most recent publication from the AMNH on the Koryak from the exhibition “Drawing Shadows to Stone: The Photography of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902” from 1997. The exhibition, current installation on the AMNH website, and associated catalogue indicate an active ‘rephotographing’ on the part of the museum. In the catalogue the authors, which include my contact at the AMNH library, Barbara Mathé, state that the Jesup North Pacific Expedition “produced more than three thousand photographs…pictures were part of holistic collections which aimed at representing entire cultures though myths, tales, songs, glossaries, artifacts, bones, bodily measurements, and images…made by the Russian anthropologists Waldemar Bogoras, Dina Jochelson-Brodskya, and Waldemar Jochelson” (Laurel, Mathé and Miller 1997: 19 and 24). Thus, although the photographs I am working with are ascribed to Bogoras it seems equally likely they could have been taken by any of the three Russian anthropologists. In fact, the exhibition catalogue goes on to note that Dina Jochelson-Brodskya “took the anthropometric measurements and assumed responsibility for much of the photography as well” (Laurel, Mathé and Miller 1997: 109).

Given the physical anthropological nature of the photographs being investigated it seems almost more likely that Jochelson-Brodskya was the hand that produced the images. Regardless of who physically took the photograph, all three Russian anthropologists were intrinsic to the production of the images.

Waldemar Bogoras and Waldemar Jochelson developed close relationships with the Koryak and other peoples during political exile to Siberia. An experience which directly contributed to their central role in the Jesup Pacific North Expedition. Dina Jochelson-Brodskya was Jochelson’s wife and a medical student. She accompanied her husband on the Jesup Expedition and gathered physical anthropological data, which formed her PhD dissertation for the University of Zurich. The close relationship of Bogoras to the peoples he studied is apparent in his role as director of the Institute of the Peoples of the North, which according to the AMNH is “an agency concerned with the education and developmental work among the northern tribes of Siberia” (American Museum of Natural History, 2009). Furthermore, as homage to the Koryak, Bogoras added the suffix Tan to his name, indicating that he in many ways considered himself to be one of them. Both Bogoras and Jochelson published on the Koryak but it is Jochelson who published the official account of the Jesup Expedition, as the leader of the group. The publication, as it is intended to be encyclopedic, includes ‘physical type’ or physical anthropological data on the Koryak people (Laurel, Mathé and Miller 1997: 19; Jochelson 1908: 408-428). This type of information betrays a certain degree of tension between the undoubtedly close personal relationship of the anthropologists to the Koryak and pejorative professional distancing. The photographs I am analyzing reside within this liminal place of tension, between reflecting personal familiar relationships and demeaning physical anthropological ideas of race as a valid category.

The photographs in question can be said to reside in a variety of different physical locations due to the reproducibility of prints and various catalogue references. The discrete sheet of images from which I am primarily working is housed in a filing cabinet in the back office of the AMNH library, the sheet is labeled “126 Jesup Siberia-Koryak.” It is drawer number 184 titled “Exhibitions: Asia” “Siberia: Jesup Expedition.” Inside the drawer are a variety of types of photographs seeming to indicate the ‘holistic’ intentions of Jesup Expedition (Laurel, Mathé and Miller 1997: 19). Photographs of the Koryak include images similar to the one I am working with and also images of larger scenes featuring groups, reindeer, and dogs. The old accession numbers (6339, 6340, and 6341), alongside the new numbers (2749, 2750, and 2751 respectively), can be used to identify original sources of information about the images. The “Catalogue of Photography, Negatives and Memoranda of Prints Volume III” provides reference to the original ledger style catalogue entry on the photographs. The entry does not provide any additional discrete information beyond what was already determined from the back of the photograph sheet. The ledger entry is interesting in contextualizing the original photographs, which are entered into the ledger among a variety of other different photographs that is quite similar to the type of organization found in the filing cabinet.

The use of accession numbers to determine the location of the original prints in a scrapbook proves to be an interesting source of information. The photographic prints were originally mounted into a scrapbook, which has since been rehoused and the original prints were cleaned. The photographs I am working with were located on the first page of Scrapbook #3. The photograph series I am working with follows on the same page a photograph of the landscape and a group scene, which includes Dina Jochelson-Brodsky. Although the scrapbooks are arranged in a seemingly haphazardous fashion and are not necessarily even ordered according to accession number the placement of these photographs on the first page alongside two other photographs, which seem to visually set the stage for the expedition, is telling. The photograph with Dina Jochelson-Brodsky is unusual in making contact apparent because according to “Drawing Shadows to Stone” “Siberian photographs…provide far less visual evidence of contact,” with ‘Western’ society including the anthropologists who produced the photographs (Laurel, Mathé and Miller 1997: 103). The photograph with Dina seems to betray the genuinely close relationship between the Koryak and the Russian anthropologists despite proclaimed professional distancing reflected in much of the photography and publication from the Jesup Pacific North Expedition. Following the first page of the scrapbook are a number of pages with similar physical anthropological photographs and also the variety of different types of photographs, as seen in the other housings of these photographs. Unlike most of the other photographs in the scrapbook the individual in the photographs I am working with is referenced by name.

I found it particularly interesting that the person in the photograph I am working with is referred to by name as Tapoka; this seems to indicate that he was particularly important to the anthropologists because virtually all other individuals photographed for the expedition are not named. Frustratingly, the role that Tapoka may have played in the Jesup North Pacific Expedition or in the lives of the anthropologists appears to have been lost to time, as I was unable to find any reference to who Tapoka was. It was Tapoka as a named individual that drove much of my research in an attempt to find some clue as to who he many have been. In the photograph he is a middle-aged man wearing a fir that seems to have been standard winter clothing (Jochelson 1908: 587). Jochelson does not feature this photograph among those published with the original publication of the information on the Koryak from the Jesup North Pacific Expedition in “The Jesup North Pacific Expedition Volume 6 The Koryak.” Nor does Jochelson-Brodsky directly reference the photograph in her dissertation, “To the topography of the female body of Northeast Siberian peoples” (translated from original German online via babelfish.com), which utilized male subjects apparently as controls in her study of female body type. Likewise, the exhibition and related materials from “Drawing Shadows to Stone: Photographing North Pacific Peoples, 1897-1902” does not utilize the photograph in question or make reference to Tapoka. Lastly, King’s recent scholarship, largely focused on shamanism seems to provide no hint as to who Tapoka was either. Could he have been a shaman? His clothes make no indication as such but the system of family shaman means there would have been many shaman and perhaps he could have been one (King 2005, King 1999).

Other photographs of Tapoka may be in and among the collection of photographs (even reproduced in publications); due to the number of photographs taken this is likely. Likewise, it is also possible that a life cast could have been made of him, as other Tapoka were used in life casts. If I could have identified him in another source then I could perhaps I could have gleaned a clue as to who he was, but unfortunately in this endeavor I was unsuccessful. I almost hope that I did simply miss some essential clue, just to know that knowledge of him still exists. And thus he still exists in the same sense that the anthropologists who photographed him and wrote of his people still exist through our knowledge of them. But, perhaps Tapoka does still exist to the Koryak and I am merely on the wrong continent to find him.

Ashley Lorentzen, NYU Museum Studies

Works Cited

American Museum of Natural History Department of Anthropology and Library. "Jesup North Pacific Expedition." American Museum of Natural History, 1902.

American Museum of Natural History. Drawing Shadows to Stone: Photographing North Pacific Peoples (1897-1902). Edited by Laurel Kendall. Tom Miller and Barbara Mathé. 2009. http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/Jesup/premain.html (accessed March 14, 2009).

Edwards, Elizabeth. 2001 "Introduction: Observations from the Coal-Face." In Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthroplogy and Museums, by Elizabeth Edwards, 1-50. New York, New York: Berg.

Geismar, Haidy. "Malakula: A Photographic Collection." Society for Comparative Study of Society and History, 2006: 520-563.

Griffiths, Alison. 2002 "Knowledge and Visuality in Nineteenth-Century Antropology." In Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture, by Alison Griffiths, 86-124. New York, New York: Columbia University Press.

Jochelson, Waldemar. The Jusup North Pacific Expedition: Memoir of the American Museum of Natural History. The Koryak. Edited by Franz Boas. Vol. 6. 12 vols. New York, New York: G. E. Stechert, 1908.

Jochelson-Brodsky, Dina. "Zur Topographie des weiblichen Korpers nordostsibirischer Volker." Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1906.

King, Alexandar. The Koryak. October 28, 2005. http://www.koryaks.net (accessed March 3, 2009).

King, Alexander D. ""Without Deer There Is No Culture, Nothing"." Anthropology and Humanism 27, no. 2 (2002): 133-164.

King, Alexander D. "Reindeer Herders' Culturescapes in the Koryak Autonomous Okrug." In People and the Land: Pathways to Reform in Post-Soviet Siberia, 63-80. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 2002.

King, Alexander D. "Soul Suckers: Vampiric Shamans in Northern Kamchatka, Russia." Anthropology of Consciousness 10, no. 4 (1999): 57-68.

Laurel, Kendall, Barbara Mathé, and Thomas Ross Miller. Drawing Shadows to Stone: The Photography of the Jusup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1902. New York, New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1997.

Pinney, Christopher. "The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography." In Anthropology and Photography 1860-1920, edited by Elizabeth Edwards, 74-91. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1992.