Marat Baltabaev – Leprosarium, Illness and
Community in Karakalpaktia

Exhibition: June 6-July 7th, 2003

The photographic series Leprosarium, Illness and Community in Karakalpaktia is the result of an extended stay within a leper’s village and hospital by the Uzbek artist Marat Baltabaev. The black and white photographs are elegant, with strong formal qualities that give the viewer the space and emotional distance required to see the beauty, and not the horror of the often-disturbing subject matter.

The photographs in this exhibition are transgressive. They challenge every traditional role of photography in Soviet and post-Soviet society. There is no theme of "progress" brought about by interaction with European culture. They don’t cater to our clichéd Western vision of an Orientalist Central Asia either, or to the pathos which typically frames our vision of the desperately ill. This is a portrait of a village, documenting every aspect of daily life, but there are differences between this and any other Karakalpak village. The leprosarium is not only home to lepers and their families, but to a staff of doctors, nurses and caretakers. The small, mud-brick houses line an avenue that leads to a cemetery, larger than usual for a village of this size. Many meals are cheerful, and taken communally; the food is traditional, but the diners lack fingers to hold knives and forks. The villagers move about, perform chores, even promenade. Those that cannot walk roll themselves about on wooden platforms. We see bemedaled war heroes, crawling on stumps of hands, men on crutches passing a newly dug grave. Some of these blinded men with twisted faces can face the camera proudly, their families beside them. Other portraits are more stark, lonely and terrible.

Marat Baltabaev is one of only two truly contemporary photographic artists working in Uzbekistan today. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union it has been possible for Baltabaev and fellow photo-journalist Anatoly Rahimbaev to publish photographs that are both socially critical and artistically demanding. Their work may be seen as a reaction to the sentimentality of the Soviet photography of the past seventy years. The new photographic work is refreshingly personal, rather than an expression of ideology.

Baltabaev and Rahimbaev often travel together through Uzbekistan, collaborating on documentary photography projects. But at the leprosarium, Baltabaev was on home ground. He was born in Karakalpakstan, in the small town of Birun (birthplace of the great medieval scholar and historian Alberuni). We spoke about his documentary partnerships, and why Rahimbaev had not participated in the leprosarium project. "These are my people, they speak my language, my dialect. They would not accept him. He is a very charming guy, but his family is Persian in background and he didn’t understand them the way I did. To become close to these people, to gain their trust, I had to work alone."

Baltabaev contrasts his work to what he calls "postcard photography". The peeling paint, dirt roads and generally disheveled air of his pictures are at least as representative of modern Central Asian life as the ancient monuments and government sponsored "folklore" of the Communist period. Baltabaev says his work is "photographing life", by which he means real life.

Marat Baltabaev (b. 1961) is a freelance photographer who developed a professional career in advertising and journalism. Like most art photographers working in the former Soviet Union, he did not study photography in school. Baltabaev had earned a technical degree in electro-mechanics before a gift from his father of a Russian camera inspired him to take up photography in 1983. The images in the gallery, however, have never been published inside Uzbekistan; photographs of a leper hospital are too politically sensitive in even this post-Soviet era.

A note on the location:

Karakalpakstan is the modern name of the ancient Karakalpaktia, and is today a semi-independent entity within the Republic of Uzbekistan. Kara-kalpak means ‘black-hat’ and refers to the traditional male cap of thick black sheepskin. Karakalpakstan is situated southeast and southwest of the Aral Sea, and occupies the western half of the Kyzylkum Desert.

The central part consists of the valley and delta of the Amu Darya, an agricultural area forced into a single-crop economy, cotton production, during the Soviet period. Cattle and Karakul sheep are raised in the Kyzylkum Desert. The average rainfall is only 3 to 4 inches yearly, and the drainage of the Aral Sea for cotton farming has combined with inflow of pesticide and mechanical residue to kill all life in the sea. The shrinkage of the Aral Sea eliminated the republic's fisheries and resulted in a harsher climate and a shorter growing season. The toxicity of land and sea has also resulted in an unprecedented health crisis; high infant mortality and chronic disease are widespread throughout the population.