Berglandschap met ruïne aan de militaire weg van Georgië c. 1890 - 1900

This landscape photograph depicting a ruin along the Georgian Military Road was taken by Dimitri Ivanovitch Ermakov. Ermakov, a 19th-century photographer, documented the Caucasus, a region marked by its diverse ethnic groups and complex political struggles between the Ottoman, Persian, and Russian empires. Ermakov's photographs offered a lens through which the Russian Empire viewed its newly acquired territories. In a way, his work played a role in shaping Russia's colonial gaze onto the Caucasus, portraying the region as both exotic and tamed. Consider the road in the photograph, a symbol of Russian expansion and control, cutting through the ancient landscape. What stories are paved over by such a road? How does the photographic process itself—the act of capturing and framing—participate in defining whose stories get told, and whose are left behind? This photograph invites us to reflect on how landscapes become implicated in narratives of power, identity, and historical change.