Untitled (Portrait of Uzbekistan) by Hassan Kurbanbaev is a photographic meditation on identity, colonial archives, and the act of seeing one's own country through inherited and contested lenses.
How do I see us? How do I photograph us? How do I want us to be seen? These are the questions that animate Hassan Kurbanbaev's ongoing series, made between 2018 and 2021 across Uzbekistan. They sound simple. They are not. Behind them lies a tangled history of visual representation—the Turkestan Album of the Russian Empire, the colour photographs of Prokudin-Gorsky, decades of Soviet-era censorship—that has shaped how Central Asia has been seen, and by whom, for over a century. Kurbanbaev enters this history not as a corrective but as a participant troubled by his own inheritance.
"In well-known formulations of postcolonial practices," he writes, "photographing the other implies that the person behind the camera is a foreigner. He has certain tasks and, of course, privileges over the person being photographed. This means that his camera is an aggressive machine." The primary basis of Central Asia's photographic archives are photographs, albums, and postcards taken by European travellers and the military elite. Exotic Orient on one hand, East Liberated on the other—orientalism and propaganda containing undeniable documentary value, but also, as Kurbanbaev puts it, "my concerns of this heritage. Do these archives really belong to us?"
The photographs themselves resist easy categorization. They are observations about a country, made through what Kurbanbaev calls "an intuitive method of cognition" that carries travel, personal, and reflective functions simultaneously. Portraits sit alongside landscapes, interiors alongside street scenes, each frame asking a slightly different version of the same question about the relationship between power, author, and image. There is no manifesto here, no thesis illustrated by examples. The work is more honest than that—it moves by accumulation and instinct, each photograph a small act of looking that acknowledges its own uncertainty.
The series gains its weight from Kurbanbaev's willingness to occupy the position of the foreigner within his own land. "Looking at the archives through the eyes of that same foreigner, taking his place, or studying the works of the first local photographer Xudoybergan Devonov," he writes, "I enter into a more complex and confusing system of personal relationship with photography." The self-awareness is not paralyzing—it is generative. The photographs emerge from a place where identity, nationality, and visual tradition are all in motion, and the camera is not a resolution but a way of staying inside the question.
In a constructed hierarchy where discussions of post-colonial and post-Soviet experience are rarely broadcast in art, and photography remains, in Kurbanbaev's words, "traumatized and unrevealed," the work serves as a form of reflection on identity and place. Whether there is an Uzbek myth hidden in the mists of the centuries, and whether he will one day be able to unravel it, remains open. The strength of the series is its refusal to pretend otherwise.
