CLINTON — Few people, aside from its inhabitants, have ever been to Siberia. That unfamiliarity has just made the place that much more famous. Has anywhere so little seen figured so much in the imaginations of so many? Heaven and hell don’t count. (Some would say Siberia is a version of the latter.) The Russian region is brutally cold, forbidding in its vastness, and synonymous with exile. “Sent to Siberia” is a phrase recognized by people who couldn’t identify Moscow as the capital of Russia — or maybe even Washington as the capital of the United States.
Of course Siberia is much more than a geographical boogeyman. The vastness may be forbidding, but it’s not empty. Siberia’s 5.1 million square miles (larger than China and India combined) are home to cities and extensive industrial development. Forty million people live there. The title of “Siberia Imagined and Reimagined” acknowledges the land’s extra-geographical dimension. The 100 photographs in the show, which runs at the Museum of Russian Icons through Jan. 10, testify to how diverse and unexpected the actual place can be.
Or not. The five bikini-clad women lolling on a snowy riverbank that Anastasia Rudenko photographed in Krasnoyarsk qualify as both unexpected (bikinis, in Siberia?) and otherwise (what else would Siberians loll on?). More predictably, there are vodka drinkers, chess players, walrus hunters. Vladimir Semin’s photograph of the hunters is startlingly dynamic, capturing a harpoon in mid-hurl. There’s also a stuffed Siberian tiger — not a photograph of one, the real thing — to greet museumgoers.
The show offers work from 50 photographers. It begins comparatively, with several ringers. Siberia was Russia’s frontier. So paired with Siberian images are others from the American West, present as well as past. Among the American photographers are some familiar names: William Henry Jackson, Ansel Adams, Stephen Shore, Alex Webb. The familiarity doesn’t end there. A Siberian town named Petropavlovka, in 2010, sure looks a lot like Corinth, N.D., in 2006. It’s a useful reminder that Siberia may not necessarily be as remote and exotic as we think. Certainly it’s not to the Siberians.
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The remainder of the show is divided chronologically. Before the Revolution offers nomads, exiled Decembrists, and gold miners. Socialist Realism introduces the Soviet era. That agit-prop aesthetic, with its emphasis on outsize gesture and radical simplification, finds a natural arena in Siberia, with its heroic scale and the heroic demands that scale places upon inhabitants. The image of Lenin looms large, literally, in Viktor Akhlomov’s “Komsomol Construction Site,” from 1970 — and dramatically (it’s on the front of a locomotive) in his “Beginning of the Line, Lena Station, Baikal-Amur Mainline,” from 1975.
The remaining sections are Realism and Post Realism. Those two titles are a bit of a cheat, but an understandable cheat. How to characterize those millions of people, and millions of square miles, under a conceptual umbrella that makes any sort of sense? Both sections pose an interesting question. As the role of ideology decreases, how to distinguish between what seems different because it’s Siberian and what seems different because it’s Soviet? Dozens of people stare at a single television screen. They’re watching a live broadcast of Yuri Andropov’s funeral. That’s Soviet difference, not Siberian difference. Andrey Shapran’s several photographs of reindeer breeders, that’s Siberian.
So many of these images have a rawness to them. Siberia may no longer be a place of exile, but neither is it much polished. Like Alaska, it still is the frontier, and in a way that the rest of the American West just isn’t. The rawness extends to the people: an assertiveness of personality. It’s there in Maria Ionova-Gribina’s photograph of a fireman with one hand on hip, the other raising a shotgun. The pose is positively Putinesque. Politics and personality align. The Russian president’s image appears outright in Rasul Mesyagutov’s photograph of a Kolyma prospector. This prospector isn’t out in the field prospecting, though. He’s seated at a computer, surrounded by three of his children. Putin’s portrait is in the background.
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A more conventional view of Siberia can be found in another Mesyagutov photograph. Its winter view of Nagaev Bay, on the Pacific coast, bears witness to how stunningly beautiful Siberia can be. It’s a reminder that the name can bespeak promise as well as well as threat. Siberia’s like life that way, only more so.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.