Abstract: The subject of this research is the study of humanitarian technologies, the formation of personal photo collections by Soviet scientists and their interpretation in a modern context. The practical application of visual research methods in sociology and anthropology, for the study in ethnic and social terms of the culture and everyday life of the indigenous populations of the North, was dictated by the need for their multidimensional examination. The systematic analysis of expeditionary drawings and photographs as a visual heritage of the Soviet era makes it possible to examine ethnographic “cultural texts” from the standpoint of new anthropological contexts within the framework of compiling memorials of events. The object of this research is the visual heritage of the Soviet scholar-ethnographer I. S. Gurvich. In studying the scientist's use of visual research methods for capturing practical observations in the course of a comprehensive study of the ethnocultural heritage and the historical and cultural dialogue of the few indigenous peoples of the North in the second half of the 20th century, the authors followed the current direction of modern visual anthropological research. In the course of the undertaken research, the authors tested the hypothesis of I. S. Gurvich's introduction of the method of visually fixating practical observations in his field studies for the Northern Expedition of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This method developed into its final form in the 1970s in the scholar's visual program of everyday history studies. The assessment of the research paradigms on the gathering of visual collections by the named intellectual and scholar of the Soviet school of Russian ethnography, allowed the authors to interpret the method of fixating the "everyday" life activities of the above-named research object with the help of photography, as an independent language of cultural self-description. A large-scale photo project on the peoples of the North, carried out by the scientist, is presented as an ethnographic “text of culture”.