Khudaibergen Devanov

Khudaibergen Devanov was born in 1879 in Khiva into the family of Nurmuhammad Devanov, who managed estates of the Khivan khanate. He was educated in Khiva, learned Arabic, wrote verse, played nearly every Uzbek musical instrument and grew some forty varieties of roses in the family garden.

His course was set by a meeting with Wilhelm Penner, the elder of the German Mennonite community near Khiva, who taught him photography. In a society where religion forbade images of living beings, Devanov became the khanate’s first photographer. He had the patronage of the vizier Islam Khoja and worked in the khan’s chancery.

In 1908 he travelled to St Petersburg with a Khivan delegation and stayed on for two months, learning from Russian photographers and studying how to shoot and screen films. He came home with photographic and film supplies and a Pathé camera. Histories of Uzbek cinema customarily begin with that year.

In 1910 he filmed the Khivan khan Asfandiyar leaving in a carriage, the first Uzbek documentary footage. Films of Khiva’s monuments and of views of Turkestan followed. After the Khorezm People’s Soviet Republic was proclaimed in 1920, Devanov held a senior post in its finance service; later he was Sovkino’s correspondent in Khorezm, sending Moscow footage that appeared in newsreels.

Devanov was arrested on 17 August 1937. According to Memorial, on 5 October 1938 the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court sentenced him to death and he was shot the same day; some publications place his death in 1940, in a camp at Yangiyul. He was rehabilitated in 1958.

Most of his footage was destroyed after the arrest. What survived is kept in the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents in Krasnogorsk and in the Devanov family archive in Urgench. A photo exhibition for the 130th anniversary of his birth was held in Tashkent in 2009; a cinema in Urgench and a street in Khiva carry his name.