Abstract: The subject of the study is the visual aspect in historical and anthropological study of the population and ethnic groups of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Social Republic, implemented in the course of field research by employees of the Research Institute of Language and Culture at the Council of People's Commissars of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Social Republic (1935) and the Yakut Museum of Local Lore by Em. Yaroslavsky name.
In the 1930s-1940s through the joint efforts of the staff the Institute and the Museum, a new array of visual sources is being formed that characterizes the traditional everyday life of the population and ethnic groups living on the territory of the republic.
The purpose and objectives of the article are determined by the need for a special review the corpus of visual sources, and in it a special analysis of the author's photographs collected as part of expeditions by employees of the first research institute and the local history museum of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic during the period under study.
The methodology for studying visual heritage is based on an interdisciplinary approach to the study of traditional culture and its objective world, as well as expeditionary photo projects as phenomena the visual culture of their time.

Abstract: The personal context of history, the individual world of experience and the perception of historical events are today the main topics of modern historical sciences. Into the circle of the research space of this article, the authors have included a range of sources of personal origin (diaries, memoirs, letters) that project the national-cultural experience and scientific strategies of the first intellectuals. The subject of this study is the life and fate of a representative of the Yakut national intelligentsia through the lens of autobiographical evidence (his personal diary) in the context of social communications and strategies. The object of this study is the history of academic training and the formation of the Yakut national intelligentsia in the context of the activities of Russian intellectual communities. In this article, the authors have undertaken an attempt at creating a historical comprehension of the "self-narrative" within the framework of a biographical discourse, where the interpretation of the autobiography acts as social practice. The conducted biographical analysis of the diary entries of A. N. Nikiforov has allowed to reveal only a fragment of an important "story about self" as a representative of a certain spiritual and religious community. The reconstruction of the "life" world of the first intellectual A. N. Nikiforov in the context of social communications and strategies of practice is one of the methodological novelties of this study. The analysis of the behavioral code of the first intellectuals, characterized by selfless service to science with a deep sense of duty and responsibility for the preservation of the disappearing life of the northern ethnicities, makes it possible to talk about the formation of a special intellectual culture in Yakut society during the period under study.