On the Road to Tusheti

The rich archive of Shalva Alkhanaidze, a self-taught Georgian photographer from Tusheti (a high mountain region in northeastern Georgia that borders two north Caucasian republics Dagestan and Chechnya), was discovered purely by accident in 2005. Since then, Alkhanaidze is considered to be one of the most outstanding authors of Georgian photography of the second half of 20th century. The body of work created by Shalva Alkhanaidze during the Soviet period (1950-1975) is free of the dogmas of Soviet photography, representing a rare example of non-propagandistic documentary photography of the middle of the past century.