{"id":49413,"date":"2026-09-03T14:01:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T12:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/?p=49413"},"modified":"2026-09-03T20:39:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-03T18:39:10","slug":"paul-nadar-uzbekistan-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/uzbekistan\/paul-nadar-uzbekistan-photography\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Country of \u00d6zbeg: Photographing Uzbekistan 136 Years After Paul Nadar"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In 1890, French photographer Paul Nadar travelled through Russian Turkestan, documenting cities, landscapes and everyday life along the newly built Trans-Caspian Railway. In 2026, Spanish photographer Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz retraced part of his journey, using Nadar’s archive to explore how Uzbekistan – and the way outsiders see it – has changed.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paul Nadar’s journey to Turkestan<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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The history of nineteenth-century photography is full of epic journeys in which adventurous photographers set off to explore distant places carrying cumbersome photographic equipment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their motivations varied. Some, such as Girault de Prangey<\/a>, travelled east as part of a broader investigation into the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Others, such as Francis Frith<\/a>, used travel to produce hundreds of photographs from around the world and build an international photographic business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Nadar’s journey to Turkestan in 1890 belongs to this tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Paul Nadar (1856-1939), the son of the celebrated French photographer F\u00e9lix Nadar<\/a>, embarked that year on a two-month journey from Paris to Tashkent. He left Paris on 24 August aboard the Orient Express and reached Constantinople three days later. From there, he crossed the Black Sea by ship to Batumi before travelling via Tiflis to Baku.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: A condensed history<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After crossing the Caspian Sea, he arrived at the Russian port of Uzun-Ada, the starting point of the recently constructed Trans-Caspian Railway. He then travelled by train through Bukhara to Samarkand, before completing the final stretch to Tashkent by horse-drawn carriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the journey, Nadar took approximately 1,800 photographs. Most of the negatives are now preserved at the M\u00e9diath\u00e8que du Patrimoine et de la Photographie in Paris<\/a>. The Getty Research Institute also holds an album entitled Photograph Album of Turkestan, 1890<\/em>, containing 74 images in an unusual circular format. Other prints are scattered across private collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His photographs cover a remarkably broad range of subjects. He documented the Trans-Caspian Railway, its stations, workers and passengers. He photographed local rulers – emirs and beys – in portraits strongly influenced by contemporary Orientalist aesthetics. He also captured everyday scenes in the bazaars, streets and squares of Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, as well as monuments, landscapes and equestrian and falconry competitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taken together, the photographs constitute an extraordinary documentary and ethnographic record of Central Asian society at the end of the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Paul Nadar. Samarkand. Sur la place du Registan<\/em>, 1890. \u00a9 Getty Research Institute.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Nadar travelled not only with the equipment required to make large 30 \u00d7 40 cm glass-plate photographs, but also with two innovative cameras: the Kodak No. 2 and the Express D\u00e9tective Nadar. Their capacity to take instantaneous photographs had a noticeable impact on the visual character of his work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Nadar’s photographs also reflected a European gaze shaped by Orientalism and by the geopolitical context of Russian expansion in Central Asia. They contributed to an image of Turkestan associated with the Western fascination with the “Orient”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: A mosa\u00efc wall<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These photographs were therefore not neutral documents. They participated in the construction of a particular European idea of Central Asia, linked to colonial imaginaries and the romantic representation of the East that developed during the nineteenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, one of the most interesting aspects of Nadar’s work lies precisely in this tension between documentation and cultural construction. His photographs have enormous historical and ethnographic value, but they also reveal a particular way of looking at and representing a territory, conditioned by the political and cultural context of his time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Uzbekistan, 2026<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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During the first half of April 2026, with support from Uzbekistan’s Ministry of Tourism through the Embassy of Uzbekistan in Spain, I travelled to Uzbekistan to develop my photographic research and creation project, In the Country of \u00d6zbeg<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taking Paul Nadar’s 1890 journey through Turkestan as its starting point, the project seeks to produce a contemporary reinterpretation of that experience through photography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My aim was to return to some of the places photographed by Nadar and construct a new visual narrative about contemporary Uzbekistan. Rather than literally reproducing his historical photographs or indulging in nostalgia for an exotic past, I wanted to establish a dialogue between past and present – between two ways of looking at the same territory separated by more than 130 years of political, social and cultural transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Uzbekistan I encountered is, of course, radically different from the territory Nadar visited at the end of the nineteenth century. The Russian Revolution, the Soviet period and independence in 1991 were followed by profound urban, economic and cultural changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: Novastan Photo Contest 2026: the results<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Infrastructure modernisation, the growth of tourism, the construction of a distinct national identity and the effects of globalisation have transformed both the physical landscape and everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against this background, In the Country of \u00d6zbeg<\/em> asks several questions. What remains today of the Orientalist imaginary constructed during the nineteenth century? How is Uzbek society represented now? How do contemporary processes of modernisation and tourism affect the visual representation of the country? And how can contemporary photography critically revisit images inherited from the past?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The project does not seek to provide definitive answers. Instead, it creates a space for visual reflection. I wanted to build a complex and open representation of Uzbekistan, avoiding exoticisation and focusing instead on tensions between tradition and modernity, memory and transformation, heritage and globalisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I worked in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva – the latter being the only city among the four that Nadar did not visit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nadar’s archive remained a conceptual reference throughout the process. Some of my photographs establish direct relationships with his images, while others focus on aspects of contemporary Uzbekistan that have no direct nineteenth-century equivalent. Through this dialogue between historical archive and contemporary production, I wanted to reflect both on the transformation of the country and on the mechanisms through which photography itself constructs representations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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From Orientalism to spectacle<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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Left: Paul Nadar, Samarkand. La mosqu\u00e9e Shah Sideh, 1890. \u00a9 Getty Research Institute. Right: \u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz, Magic City, Tashkent, 2026. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The nineteenth-century European Orientalist imagination perceived Central Asia as a world of madrasas, mosques and bazaars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, however, there are other forms of architecture that can produce a comparable sense of visual estrangement while belonging to an entirely different historical and cultural context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These include the striking examples of Soviet modernist and brutalist architecture found across Tashkent, from the city’s metro stations to Hotel Uzbekistan. But there are also more recent forms of architectural spectacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Magic City in Tashkent, for example, an enormous fairy-tale castle reminiscent of Walt Disney architecture forms the centrepiece of an entertainment and commercial complex. It is a very different kind of exoticism from the one imagined by nineteenth-century Europeans, but one that is equally constructed through image and spectacle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. An Uzbek family visiting the recently inaugurated Imam al-Bukhari complex near Samarkand, 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It is also significant to observe the Uzbek government’s construction of large cultural and religious complexes inspired by Timurid architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This process of recovering and monumentalising the past creates new architectural icons intended both to project a national identity and attract cultural and religious tourism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, these buildings reveal a tension between the recovery of tradition and the creation of genuinely contemporary architecture. Reproducing historical forms can produce an architecture close to scenography or pastiche, in which the past itself becomes an image used to represent the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet this tension becomes more interesting at the decorative level. Colours, geometries, latticework and motifs inherited from Central Asian traditions are being reinterpreted through new materials and technologies, producing a contemporary visual identity grounded in architectural memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Left: \u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. Decorative motif, Tilla-Kori Madrasa, Registan Square, Samarkand, 2026. Right: \u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. Decorative motif, Imam al-Bukhari complex near Samarkand, 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The two images show the continuity and transformation of a characteristic Central Asian ornamental vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traditional combinations of brick and glazed ceramics in turquoise, blue and earth tones coexist with contemporary interpretations using glass, metal and modern construction techniques.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same visual resources – colour, stars, diamonds and geometric grids – are rationalised into more regular patterns that not only decorate buildings but filter light and structure space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is therefore not simply a literal reproduction of the past. It is an aesthetic translation of heritage, in which historic forms and colours are abstracted and adapted to the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Registan: from urban centre to global icon<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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Left: Paul Nadar, Marchand de past\u00e8ques sur la place du Registan<\/em>, 1890. \u00a9 Getty Research Institute. Right: \u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. Registan Square, Samarkand, 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Samarkand’s Registan is one of the places that most clearly illustrates the changes Uzbekistan has undergone over the past 130 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Nadar photographed the square in 1890, it remained a centre of urban life: a place of commerce and movement, surrounded by madrasas that still served their original functions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The buildings were in poor condition, but the space remained embedded in the everyday life of Samarkand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, the Registan has become one of Uzbekistan’s most recognisable visual icons and a centre of the country’s booming tourism industry. Its monumental buildings have been extensively restored, while many of the cells that once accommodated madrasa students now contain souvenir shops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The transformation is striking. The architecture survives, but the social function of the space has profoundly changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Representing Uzbek women<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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Left: Paul Nadar, Femme indig\u00e8ne et son enfant sur la place du Registan<\/em>, 1890. \u00a9 Getty Research Institute. Right: \u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. Grandmother and granddaughter on the road between Samarkand and Shahrisabz, 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These photographs create a powerful visual contrast between two representations of Uzbek women separated by more than a century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Nadar’s photograph, the woman appears almost elusive, heavily covered and anonymous within the surrounding landscape. My photograph from 2026 presents a very different encounter: a grandmother and her granddaughter look directly at the camera with confidence and complicity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The older woman’s traditional textile patterns coexist naturally with the younger girl’s pink sweatshirt. Their clothing, expressions and relationship suggest both continuity and change, while resisting the tendency to reduce contemporary Uzbek women to a single image of either “tradition” or “modernity”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A globalised Uzbekistan<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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Left: \u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. Young Uzbek man wearing an FC Barcelona shirt, Samarkand, 2026. Right: \u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. Balloon seller, Bukhara, 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For me, these images capture Uzbekistan as a kind of living palimpsest, in which global modernity is written over layers of history without fully erasing them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the first photograph, a young Uzbek man poses in an FC Barcelona shirt. The club crest and Spotify logo form unmistakably contemporary symbols against a background of traditional brick architecture, illustrating the extent to which global mass culture has become part of local identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the second, a balloon seller walks beside the historic brick walls of Bukhara’s Ark carrying a dense cluster of bright red heart-shaped balloons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The plastic, ephemeral colour of the balloons stands in sharp contrast to the monumental architecture of a city that Nadar himself photographed in 1890.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both photographs show how the symbols of the twenty-first century occupy the same spaces as the physical traces of historic Turkestan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The road and the destination<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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Left: Paul Nadar, Instant shots from the trip to Turkestan<\/em>, 1890. \u00a9 BnF, Prints and Photographs Department, EO-112 (24)-FOL B BOX. Right: \u00a9 Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. Khiva city wall, 2026.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

These final two images bring the visual journey to a close by connecting movement with destination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nadar’s photograph documents the Trans-Caspian Railway, whose construction began in 1879. I find it fascinating to think that this infrastructure made his journey through the region – and therefore his photographic work – possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his image, the railway appears fragile as it cuts across the desert landscape. To me, it evokes the epic quality associated with the early history of photography in this part of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My photograph of Khiva’s walls represents the end of my own journey through Uzbekistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read more on Novastan<\/strong>: In Khiva\u2019s Old Town<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where Nadar’s image captures the infrastructure that enabled movement across the region at the end of the nineteenth century, my own gaze comes to rest on the solidity of Khiva’s adobe walls, glowing in the evening light at the final stop on my itinerary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In placing these two photographs together, I wanted to connect the historical infrastructure that enabled Nadar’s exploration with the architecture that marked the conclusion of my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Epilogue<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

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Travelling through Uzbekistan in Paul Nadar’s footsteps has helped me understand that photography documents not only space, but time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Country of \u00d6zbeg<\/em> was not conceived as an exercise in Orientalist nostalgia, but as a visual dialogue with a territory that is constantly being rewritten.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By confronting the photographic archive of 1890 with my own images from 2026, Uzbekistan emerges not as a static landscape, but as a society in which Timurid memory, the traces of the Soviet era and the symbols of globalisation coexist in everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My physical journey ended at the walls of Khiva, but the question of photographic representation remains open.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking at the present through the reflection of the past is, ultimately, one way of understanding how we construct our own identities in the mirror of history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz<\/a> is a Spanish photographer, university professor and researcher specialising in the history of nineteenth-century photography. He holds a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, where his doctoral research examined Orientalism in nineteenth-century photography and the relationship between photography, travel and representations of the East<\/a>. His work combines artistic practice, academic research and teaching, with a particular focus on photography, territory, representation and Orientalist visual cultures. He is a professor and academic director of the Master’s Degree in Artistic Photography at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and a member of the Iranian Peoples Studies Group<\/a> (GEPI) at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He is also part of the research project \u201cCrossed Perspectives between the Iranian and Hispanic Worlds: Narratives and Representations in the Contemporary Era\u201d, funded by Spain\u2019s Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (Reference: PID2023-1502740A-100).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In 1890, French photographer Paul Nadar travelled through Russian Turkestan, documenting cities, landscapes and everyday life along the newly built Trans-Caspian Railway. In 2026, Spanish photographer Pablo Mart\u00ednez Mu\u00f1iz retraced part of his journey, using Nadar’s archive to explore how Uzbekistan – and the way outsiders see it – has changed. Paul Nadar’s journey to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2265,"featured_media":49428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4670,4668,5],"tags":[4674,1411,4280,999,3974],"coauthors":[5044],"class_list":["post-49413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-sports","category-society","category-uzbekistan","tag-orientalism","tag-paul-nadar","tag-photography","tag-turkestan","tag-uzbekistan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49413"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49450,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49413\/revisions\/49450"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49413"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novastan.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=49413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}