This book 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, this innovative account 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...