Paper short abstract:

Schedule on Oct 12 or 13 i.e. not Oct 10 or 11.

Paper long abstract:

The intended paper deals with the imagery of gravestones and photographs of Southern Georgia, a region bordering with Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. The period from the abolition of serfdom (1861-1864) to the Russian revolutions (1905-1917) falls exactly within the time that the folk tradition of making gravestones was still alive and studio photography had spread widely throughout the Caucasus. At the same time, the yet colonial nation was experiencing cardinal socio-cultural changes, also reflected in the prestige of having a splendid photographic portrait taken in one's lifetime and a well-decorated gravestone afterwards. This is, somehow, a continuation of the medieval tradition of donor portraits and early-modern easel painting but in a merely common way of secularization, which created new forms of religious aspiration. The surfaces of gravestones and photographs are compared with each other, in their anthropomorphic manifestations and world of objects: human images with tools, weapons and other belongings. All these materials provide us with data on diverse social strata, their daily activities, religious beliefs, and expectations of posthumous life. In this case, the gravestone-photography opposition facilitates understanding of the present and the afterlife, with all their real-to-symbolic attributes and expressed feelings of joy or sorrow. The images of remembrance in Southern Georgia culturally belong to local ethnicities (Georgians, Armenians, Azeri) and their confessions (various denominations of Christianity, Islam, and some signs of Paganism), and in these multiple intersections we can outline the particular and universal features of their visual vocabulary. Inscriptions on gravestones or photographs, carrying the folkloric values or ethnographic knowledge, are another key for understanding the imagery. They fill up and contextualize the images of deceased with notes on their lives, death causes, and ascribed personal qualities. Thus, the images of remembrance are significant primary sources for the interdisciplinary history of this multiethnic region of Georgia in the late nineteenth century, reconstructed and analyzed through gravestones and photographs. This paper is based on the photography collections of the National Library and the gravestones, photographically recorded within the project Memorial Monuments of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries in Georgia (2018-2021), funded by the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation and being conducted at the Chubinashvili National Research Centre.