Creating a collection of historical photographs of Udmurt people, or photographs depicting locations in Udmurtia.

The Udmurt Historical Photographs Collection is our growing, open, linked collection of dispersed historical photographs of Udmurt people, or photographs depicting locations in Udmurtia. We create relevant, and openly available photographs (or their digital surrogates) into this collection, and try to put it under the care of the community of Udmurts and researchers of Udmurt cultural history.

Our aim is to find in Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian and other collections relevant photographs or provenance information, and try to validate, enrich or repair it with the knowledge of Udmurts.

For example, the back side has a strange, hard to decipher historical location (Gombur-Gurt and Medemuka) in phonetic German transliteration for a placename of a photograph on a “Udmurt woman.” The photograph is a part of a series in the photographic collection of the Estonian National Museum. (Unfortunately, some elements were removed during the 1950s by the Soviet censor.) It requires a good command of Udmurt and local historical cartography knowledge to locate the geographical provenance of this photograph. Solving this puzzle then solves many other problems with this material, and also offers the hope that we can find the lost elements of this series in another collection.