In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes famously refused to reprint what he referred to as the Winter Garden photograph of his mother as a child, but he reflected on its meaning and details extensively (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). In Agitating Images: Photography Against History in Indigenous Siberia, Craig Campbell reverses this strategy, presenting many photographs and photographic fragments of early twentieth-century Siberia, but refusing to analyze or discuss individual images. This is a deliberate choice, one that stems from Campbell’s assumption that photographs are “agents provocateurs” (xiv) in their capacity to disrupt historical narratives. As a self-declared “experiment in form” (xix), his book is designed to provoke the reader, drawing playful parallels with early Communist notions of “agitation” as an “act of cultural critique” (xiii). Not all readers, however, are likely to agree that the photographs in this historical account of Soviet cultural interventions in Siberia unsettle the text productively.

Agitating Images is divided into two main sections. In the first, Campbell traces how both the Tsarist and Soviet regimes came to know and interact with the Evenki culture and reindeer economy of Central Siberia. Ethnography, state formation, and the mobility of goods were all dramatically reshaped by the October Revolution in 1917. The central focus of this section is the imposition of Soviet modernity in the region, especially through the establishment of Culture Bases in the late 1920s. Moving beyond the tenuous imperial administrative structures, Soviet agitators and inspectors sought a more permanent foothold in remote regions in order to “truly penetrate the primeval darkness of the tundra” (102). These multi-purpose service centers were intended to protect Indigenous peoples from “exploitation, starvation, and sickness,” while simultaneously preparing them for “full participation in the imminent Communist utopia” (105). A showcase of Soviet modernity for the Evenki and other Indigenous peoples, the Culture Base also served as a stable archive of ethnographic observation and natural resource exploration (119). In this discussion Campbell highlights the work of I. M. Suslov, an anthropologist and geographer who carried out cultural-enlightenment projects among the Evenki and oversaw the construction of the Tura/Tungus Culture Base.

Campbell opens the lengthy first chapter, “The Years Are Like Centuries,” with a series of historical maps, but after six pages of cartographic illustrations, the format changes. At this point, the layout of each page starts to include one or two cropped photographs and photographic details, each two inches square, in the upper-right corner. No captions or explanation of the images are provided in the text—indeed, the publisher does not even recognize them as illustrations in the prefatory material. Over two hundred of these small images punctuate the pages as “anti-illustration[s]” inserted to “actively agitate against the written history” (xx). Campbell has thus offered a ready-made visual mode of destabilization to counter his own historical narrative. As a visual counterpoint, the incongruities in the photographs are intended to “hang out untidily from the history” and to “invite trouble” (226).

The book’s second section is a shorter chapter, entitled “Dangerous Communications,” which offers a more sustained reflection on photographs, Soviet photographic practices, history writing, and the archive. However, for reasons left unexplained, this section repeats material included in the first, so that the reader again encounters an introduction to the geography of Evenkiia, the processes of sovietization, and the Culture Base projects. Textual repetitions are also numerous even within each of the two main sections, and there are moments when these make the text more “agitating” than the photographs.

In contrast to the first chapter, “Dangerous Communications” offers photographs that are reprinted at half-page size, with full negative edges visible within the frame, and minimal captions. But here, all is not what it seems. In his prologue, Campbell declares that the photographs in the second section are meant to “extend the textual arguments,” but he still does not refer to the images in his textual account. Instead, the photographs are meant to agitate “in a passive sense” and ultimately “redistribute the production of historical knowledge across an ambivalent register of ordinary life” (xx). In fact, it is only within the prologue that Campbell engages with specific photographs. The rest of the book speaks of photographs in the abstract as largely undifferentiated entities that “mock interpretation” and refuse to “participate in the production of history” (208).

Campbell does see the possibility of using the dissonance and excesses of photographs to find “other histories” (184), but resistances and alternative interpretations do not emerge from Agitating Images. There can be no counter-narrative because to produce one would enclose the photograph in yet another history, rather than allow “all [the interpretations] to gather in their queer indeterminacy” (190). Campbell may not wish to speak to the photographs directly, since their very nature is to “passively labour against interpretation” (190), but in selecting, cropping, and reprinting photographs, he is nevertheless offering an interpretation of them. More than twenty years ago, W. J. T. Mitchell’s study of the photographic essay in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) pointed to the “mutual ‘resistance’” of photography and writing (322). But for Campbell they do not simply resist each other; they are actively hostile.

The archive plays a large role in Agitating Images. Not surprisingly, the book positions the unsettling power of photographs against the taxonomical grain, disrupting the archive as both a technology of rule and a producer of orderly historical narratives. However, far too much of the material summarizes well-worn scholarly trajectories. The particular operations of the Siberian archives that Campbell encounters are fascinating when they make an appearance, but such glimpses are too few. Readers learn that in 1970, Suslov sent the Evenki Region’s Museum of Local History hundreds of photographic prints for an anniversary exhibition, complete with a commentary and annotations. This is all that the reader learns, because there is no analysis of specific photographs or their textual linkages. Campbell wants to demonstrate how “the project of writing the past is affected by the circulations and noncirculations of archival photographs” (154), yet this promising link is never fully forged because he does not engage with examples of these photographic afterlives. There are many intriguing gestures toward how photographs shape history, but most of the discussion is limited to broad strokes.

Campbell has produced a companion website that takes up many of the themes of “Dangerous Communications.” Here, portions of the text are reproduced along with videos, vignettes, and an occasional photograph annotated with pop-up text. Of particular interest is the “Archival Degenerator,” which randomizes photographs in order to deny the archive a sense of order and produce new connections or disconnections between the images. The viewer certainly experiences a sense of dissonance in refreshing the random images, but the contrasts feel more aesthetic than disruptive. Perhaps that is also the point, as the website allows for the visual surfaces of the images to engage the viewer differently, highlighting the very limitations of the book as a platform for expressing the epistemological gaps that Campbell is attempting to reveal.

In his own answer to Mitchell’s question, “What do pictures want?” Campbell argues that photographs want to “undo stability” and “pull out the carpet from underneath the contentment of scholarship” (208; cf., W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Agitating Images is intentionally provocative in its practice, its design, and its attempt to combine archival ethnology, cultural history, and critical theory. There is a great deal to ponder in Campbell’s intervention, and certainly the willingness to test the boundaries of form, within and beyond the book, is laudable. The problem is that by reducing photographs to visual fragments that pierce the acts of writing and reading textually based histories, Agitating Images denies these photographs their own histories.