10 unique 19th century postcards from Taus Makhacheva’s personal archive as seen in the artist’s book Types du Caucase.

Each postcard represents a “pittoresque” group from various tribes, families, nationalities or representatives of diverse professions of people from the Caucausus, presented in a style of colonial pictorialism emblematic of the exotization perpetuated by Russian/French speaking elites of the time.
Here, the artist has handwritten distinct texts by different writers, politicians and historians from the beginning and middle of the 20th century, depicting their various views on the Caucasus:

“When craftsmen from Persia heard about skillful gunsmiths from Kubachi, they sent them a steel wire, as thin as a hair, and wrote: ‘If you are really so skillful, then make the same thin wire and send it to us.’ People in Kubachi answered in a peculiar way – they drilled a hole in the wire which they had received and returned it back to Persia saying: ’We make tubes out of such wire’."
R. Alikhanov from The Kubachinskiy essays