Sekta Kaliandari" Ulichnye nishchie Kaliandari"

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Its title names the Kalandars, a wandering dervish order whose members lived by begging in the towns of Central Asia, and the caption pairs the sect name with the words for street beggars. The print appeared in the Turkestan Album, an ethnographic series issued in 1871 and 1872 as Russian rule expanded across the region. Such images were meant to catalog local peoples and social types, so presenting a beggar as a representative figure reflects imperial documentary habits as much as it reflects the man himself. The albumen process used for prints like this one coated paper with egg white and light-sensitive salts, which gave them a fine tonal range and a glossy surface.

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