Techniques of Whiteness in Photographs from the Late Russian Empire

Celebrated as a glittering relic of the final decades of the Russian Empire, the Album of the Costume Ball at the Winter Palace (1903) showcases photographic portraits of imperial elites posing in seventeenth-century costumes worn to a series of balls in Saint Petersburg. This essay reconsiders the album as an exemplar of the visual artefacts that promoted a skewed vision of the whiteness of Russia’s leadership in the late imperial era. Such photographic commissions appropriated cultures east of the imperial centre, and erased the collaboration of leadership from Asia in securing imperial rule. The relationships between erasure and representation through form are explored through the conduits of photography, icons, and material culture, offering a multimedia approach to deflecting the spectacle of imperial whiteness.