Part 2: Baron de Baye’s Georgia photos and the story behind them
After last post got a lot of interest, I looked more into the story behind these photos.
These are more photos by Joseph Berthelot Baron de Baye (1853–1931), a French archaeologist, ethnographer, and traveler who made repeated trips to the Caucasus between 1897 and 1904. His Georgia and Caucasus photographs are now considered one of the largest surviving visual collections of the region from that period preserved in France.
What makes his work especially interesting is that he was not just taking formal “old-timey” portraits. He photographed streets, markets, villages, religious holidays, landscapes, everyday clothing, and people in motion. Researchers note that many of his shots almost look cinematic, because he used a small Eastman Kodak camera that let him capture movement much more easily than many photographers of the time.
He spent a lot of time in Tbilisi (Tiflis) and used the city almost like a visual meeting point between Europe and Asia. One of his recurring themes was the mix of styles, faces, and clothing in the Caucasus, especially in Georgia, where he tried to show how different cultural worlds overlapped in everyday life.
Another cool detail is that de Baye sometimes left traces of himself inside the photos. In some images you can literally see his shadow, and in others you can spot other photographers’ tripods or equipment in the frame. According to the research on his collections, this was not just accidental, it became part of how he documented the act of photographing itself.
His photos were scattered for years across museums, archives, and private collections in France. A recent study brought together material from several institutions and found that out of 1,825 known photos from his travels in the Russian Empire, about 1,140 were taken in the Caucasus. The Musée du quai Branly alone holds 14 albums, including 752 Caucasus photos from 1897–1903.
In the 1920s, after Georgia lost its independence to Soviet Russia, de Baye’s photos and publications were used by Georgian émigrés in France to help present Georgian culture and support the cause of independence abroad.
So these pictures are not only beautiful documents of Georgia's past, they have also become part of Georgia's cultural memory and political history.
Sources:
Ana Cheishvili, The Photographic Collections of Baron de Baye (2023) PDF, https://edizionicafoscari.unive.it/media/pdf/books/978-88-6969-667-1/978-88-6969-667-1-ch-07.pdf
https://postreflex.wordpress.com/2020/03/17/baron-de-baye-caucasus/
